*     NOV  10  1906 


3 


CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY 


*&v& 


Concepts  of  Philosophy 


IN  THREE  PARTS 


Part  1— ANALYSIS 


Part  II— SYNTHESIS 

a.  From  Physics  to  Sociality 

b.  From  Sociality  to  Religion 


Part  III— DEDUCTIONS 


By 
Alexander  Thomas  Ormond 

McCosh  Professor  of  Philosophy  in  Princeton  University 


j|5eto  gotft 
THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

LONDON:  MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Ltd. 
1906 

All  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1906 
By  THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Set  up  and  printed  from  type.    Published 
September,  1906 


THE  MASON-HENRY  PRESS 

SYRACUSE,    NEW    YORK 


MY  PUPILS 
PAST  AND  PRESENT 

WITH    WHOM    I    HAVE    ENJOYED 

THE    PRIVILEGE    OF    DISCUSSING    MANY 

OF  THE  THEMES  TREATED  HERE 

THIS  VOLUME 

IS  AFFECTIONATELY 
INSCRIBED 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 


GENERAL    INTRODUCTION. 

The  narrowing  effects  of  specialism,  subjective  and  objective. 
Its  antidote.  Need  of  the  discipline  of  Philosophy.  Nature 
of  its  synthesis.  Kant.  His  Copernican  revolution.  Its  rela- 
tion to  the  modern  problem.  Science  and  Metaphysics.  Their 
conflict  and  its  causes.  The  failure  of  Metaphysics.  To  be 
remedied  by  determining  the  point  of  departure,  method  and 
categories  of  a  Metaphysical  interpretation.  Consciousness  in 
form  of  self-agency  as  real.  As  basal  in  Metaphysics.  Its 
nature  (1)  as  Volitional,  (2)  as  Ideal.  Synthesis  of  the  two 
elements  in  the  concept  of  Eeason.  Eeason  as  the  organ  of 
Philosophy.  Teleologieal,  working  under  the  categories  of  ra- 
tional insight  and  purpose.  Synthesis  with  methods  and  con- 
cepts of  Science.  How  the  synthesis  of  Philosophy  completes 
itself, pp.   1-18 

PART  I. 
ANALYSIS. 


CHAPTER  I. 

CONSCIOUSNESS    AS    KNOWEE. 

Man  related  to  the  world  and  himself  through  consciousness.  Con- 
sciousness indefinable,  but  knows  itself  in  Self -Knowledge.  Self 
not  picturable,  but  is  known  immediately.  The  cognitive  activity 
dependent  on  the  emoto-volitional,  but  inseparable  from  it  and 
underivative.  The  two  points  of  view.  (1)  The  external  as 
objective,  observational  and  descriptive.  From  this  view-point 
consciousness  stands  outside  of  its  world  as  observer.     This  the 


viii  CONTENTS. 

standpoint  of  Science.  How  Science  proceeds  to  build  up  its 
doctrine  of  the  world.  Changes.  Kecurrences.  Generalization. 
The  space  and  time  elements.  Mathematics — proceeds  under 
concepts  of  space,  time  and  number.  Its  quantitative  character. 
Dynamic  Science — its  categories;  cause,  substances,  or  underlying 
forces.  Illustration  of  demand  for  substance.  Matter  the  sub- 
stantial term  in  Science.  Summary  of  first  point  of  view. 
(2)  The  second  point  of  view  is  internal.  Consciousness  central. 
Organ  of  emoto-volitional  effort.  Character  of  its  agency — 
end-seeking  or  teleological.  This  a  function  of  self-hood.  Its 
categories — finality  and  purpose.  Corresponding  categories  of 
Science — natural  causation  and  mechanical  agency.  How  the 
demand  for  knowledge  leads  to  the  use  of  standpoints  of  both 
Natural  Science  and  Metaphysics.  The  measure  of  knowledge 
only  reached  in  synthesis  of  the  mechanical  and  teleological. 
The  need  of  Metaphysics.  Why  the  demand  for  knowledge 
cannot  be  fully  satisfied  by  Science.  The  spiritual  nature  and 
its  problems — which  admit  only  of  a  metaphysical  solution, 

pp.  18-42 

CHAPTER    II. 

GROUND-PRINCIPLES. 

The  three  modes  of  determining  things.  Mathematics — Rests  on 
space,  time  and  number.  Deals  with  relations  in  quantitative 
aspect.  Abstracts  from  quality  of  terms.  Its  ground-principle 
— whole  and  parts.  Method;  quantitative  equivalence  of  terms 
of  fixed  value.  Physical  Science — Rests  on  qualitative  change. 
Its  principle,  Natural  Causation.  How  differs  from  Mathema- 
tics. Categories — matter  (or  substance),  motion.  Ground- 
principle — Ground  and  Phenomena.  Generic  division  of  Science 
into  Mathematical  and  Physical  or  Natural  Science.  Meta- 
physics. Its  presumption  of  consciousness  as  inner  nature. 
Its  principle — Finality.  Organizing  Category — Purpose.  Ground 
Principle.  Inception  and  Realization,  or  Idea  and  Beality. 
Relation  of  the  two  terms.  Purpose  as  mediator.  Metaphysical 
doctrine  of  the  world.  Correlation  of  the  three  ground-prin- 
ciples. Successive  rational  conceptions  of  the  world.  Relation 
between  the  concepts  of  Physics  and  Metaphysics.         pp.  42-64 

CHAPTER  III. 

METHODS    IN   PHILOSOPHY. 

The  two  ideas  of  method.  The  more  fundamental  idea — what  it 
involves — (1)      in     Science — indifference     to     consciousness — an 


CONTENTS. 


objective  order-to  be  investigated  from  standpoint  of  external 
observer.    Method  in  Metaphysics-Primacy  of   consciousncss- 
kL  np  of   subject  and  object.     Kant's  Copernican  revo  ution 
Is  history.     Nature   of   the   problem.     The   object™  order   of 
gin  e      Which  shall  be  primal-Mind  or   Matter!     Evolution 
^Kant's    critical    doctrine    in   Pre-Critical   WriUng^enods 
of   development   1766-1771.     1771-1781,  Doctrine  of   Space   and 
Time      The    Categories.      Constitutional    principles    of    world- 
order'.     The  Metaphysical  Categories-prevision  and  purpose  as 
grounding    mechanical    concepts   of    Science      How    the     hange 
affects    the    world    of    consciousness.      Centrality    of    self- ts 
reality      Kant's    difflculty-the    self    in    consciousness    not    re- 
gar^d  by  him  as  the  real  self-hence  failure  of  Metaphysics, 
low    Kant    could    have    completed    the    Copernican    revolution 
?ae  idea  of  God-its  uecessity.     Infereu tial  know pledge. Reason 
for  enlarging  on  the  Kantian  revolution.     Complete  method  of 
knowredge-Mathematics-concepts  aud  method.     Mixed  Mathe- 
matics    Physical    or    Natural    Science-concepts    and    method. 
T^sitiou   from   the  Mathematical  world   to   that  of   Science 
Ground  and  Phenomena.     Problem  of  agency.     Natural _  Causa 
tiou      Procedure     mechauical.      Transitiou     to     Metaphysics- 
method  of  conscious  agency.    Belated  to  Physical  Science  through 
Hs  category  of  ground.     Translation  of  ground  and  phenomena 
illdi: :  and   Llity.     Translation   of   mechanical   forces   into 
volitional   agents.     The   phenomenal   world   of    Science   and  the 
"work  of  Metaphysics.     Proceeds  by   finality   and  pur- 
pose.    The   ultimate    nature    of    reality.     Analogy    of    selfhood. 
Pluralism  and  unity, 

CHAPTER  IV. 

THE    WORLD    OP    EXISTENTS. 
The  two  groups  of  existences.    Existence  of  the  -'-self.     Objective 
existence   given   immediately.    Problem  of  real   existence     Dis 
rc"n  between  objects  and  ejects.     How  the  ejec    is  known 
Uu  tration  of  the  dog.     The  real  existent  that  which  resiss  b 
effort.     How    the    dog    characterizes    objects.     Spontaneous    u  e 
of  self-analogy.    Recognition  of  physical  object  later  than  that 
of  the  psychic.     Problems.     (1)  How  we  come  spontaneously  to 
know  self.     (2)  Knowledge  of  objects  that  are  symbols  of  not- 
self      (3)    How    we    come    to    assert    ejects    (a)    other    selves 
(b)'  Physical  ejects.     The  primary  impulse  of  a  conscious  agent 
-to  define  the  nature  of  other  agents  into  which  it  interacts  in 


CONTENTS. 

terms  of  itself.  The  ejects  are  Metaphysical  reals.  The 
unity  of  the  world, — requires  some  world-insight  that  takes 
thought  for  the  whole.  Hence  the  transcendent  eject  or  God. 
On  what  ground  his  existence  affirmed.     Summary,        pp.  99-119 


CHAPTER  V. 

PEIMAKY    CERTITUDE. 

Distinction  between  Primary  Certitude  and  Validity.  Distinction 
In  twoen  theoretic  certitude  and  belief  which  rests  on  Will. 
There  arise  (1)  theoretic  judgments  of  two  species,  (a)  intui- 
tive, (b)  rational.  (2)  The  judgments  of  rational  belief. 
Nature  of  intuitive  judgment.  Two  classes,  (a)  factual,  (b) 
constructual.  The  certitude  of  Mathematics — conceptual  intui- 
tion the  basis  of  the  first  Mathematical  data.  Mathematical 
ratiocination.  Nature  of  Mathematical  reasoning.  Certitude 
of  extra  Mathematical  Sciences,  (1)  factual,  in  sphere  of 
observation  and  description;  (2)  rational  necessity  in  sphere  of 
explanatory  theory.  The  certitude  of  Metaphysics,  (1)  its 
ground  certitude  that  of  self -existence.  (2)  Certitude  as  to 
existence  of  other  self-agents — Reflective  inference  based  on 
self-analogy.  Giving  rise  to  a  form  of  rational  necessity. 
Negative  test.  The  certitude  of  belief.  Postulate  of  practical 
reason.  Criticism  of  Kant's  divorce  of  practical  from  theo- 
retical necessity.     Force  of  the  belief -judgment,         pp.  119-136 


PART  II. 
SYNTHESIS. 

DIVISION  A. 

FROM    FHYSICS    TO    SOCIALITY. 

CHAPTER  1. 

THE    DIALECTIC. 

The  two  standpoints  in  experience  for  the  interpretation  and  realiza- 
tion of  the  world, — the  inner  and  the  more  external.  Correlated 
presuppositions,     standpoints     and     methods,     (1)     of     Natural 


CONTENTS.  xi 

Science,  (2)  of  Metaphysics, — restated.  Eevision  involved  in 
passing  from  one  to  another, — its  nature.  The  mechanical  and 
teleological.  Distinction  between  spontaneous  and  reflective 
consciousness; — Science  and  spontaneity.  The  plain  man's  view 
— how  far  valid — its  place  in  the  dialectic.  Terms  of  the 
dialectic, — the  concepts  and  principles  respectively  of  Scientific 
(or  mechanical)  and  Metaphysical  (or  teleological)  explanation. 
Nature  of  the  dialectic, — its  polar  and  synthetic  character. 
Stages  of  the  dialectic;  (1)  Physics  and  Metaphysics.  (2) 
Biology  (the  lower  organic  and  its  Metaphysical  presupposi- 
tions). (3)  Consciousness,  (a)  as  scientifically  treated  under 
the  psycho-physical  parallelism,  (b)  as  Metaphysically  treated 
under  category  of  selfhood  and  its  analogies.  (4)  Sociality 
treated  under  the  rubrics  of  Science  and  Metaphysics  respect- 
ively. (5)  The  ultra-social  world  of  religion.  Culmination  of 
the   dialectic, pp.   139-157 


CHAPTER  II. 

PHYSICAL    ACTIVITIES. 

The  two  problems.  (1)  Epistemological.  The  categories  of  ob- 
jective definition.  (2)  Question  of  content  involving  (a)  the 
world-concept  that  underlies  Physical  investigation,  (b)  essential 
elements  in  Physical  method.  The  concepts  of  matter  and  mo- 
tion as  related  to  the  notions  of  ground  and  phenomena.  Motion 
the  constitutive  category.  The  concept  of  matter  as  a  basis 
and  medium  of  motion.  Static  and  dynamic  tendencies.  The 
notion  of  agency — indispensable  in  Physics.  Method — its  three 
moments  —  inductive  observation  —  causal  explanation  —  mathe- 
matical determination.  Mill's  doctrine  of  method.  Formalists 
and  dynamists — the  issue  between  them.  The  Metaphysical 
demand  in  connection  with  each.  The  Metaphysical  investiga- 
tion arises  out  of  the  demand  for  deeper  conscious  agency — 
selection — guidance — purpose.  This  takes  form  of  selfhood  and 
is  central  in  experience.  The  three  topics;  (1)  the  necessity, 
(2)  the  modus,  (3)  the  limit  of  Metaphysical  interpretation. 
Its  necessity ;  need  of  an  intelligible  reason  for  the  existence  of 
things, — inability  of  Physical  Science  to  supply  such  reason. 
The  modus  of; — failure  of  dualism.  A  synthesis  that  grounds 
and  at  the  same  time  reifies  the  Physical  categories.  Limit  of. 
Metaphysical  problems  arise  out  of  the  ultra-mechanical  needs 
of   Physics, pp.    158-186 


xii  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  III. 

ORGANIC    MOVEMENTS. 

Life  an  impcrium  in  impcrio.  Its  fundamental  terms — the  germ-cell 
— the  life-movement.  Relation  to  the  terms  of  Physics;  matter 
and  motion.  Qualitative  differences.  Selectiveness  of  the  life- 
movement.  Plasticity  of  the  life-substance.  Causation  in 
Biology — its  genetic  character.  Terms  of  its  operation,  organ- 
ism and  environment.  Line  of  cleavage  among  biologists.  The 
Phylogenic  and  Ontogenic  factors.  Genetic  form  of  the  biolog- 
ical judgment.  Processes  in  Biology — evolution  and  heredity. 
Nature  of  these — issue  between  ontogenists  and  phylogenists. 
Lamarckian  —  Spencerian  and  Darwinian  —  Weismannian 
theories.  Congenital  heredity  and  natural  selection.  Weakness 
of  natural  selection.  The  Lamarckian  proposed — its  weak- 
ness. Theory  of  organic  selection — its  originators — how  it 
remedies  the  defects  of  other  proposed  factors.  Agencies  by 
which  the  processes  are  realized.  Natural  selection.  Use  and 
disuse.  The  problem  of  "definite  and  determinate  variation." 
How  organic  selection  meets  this  requirement — narrow  range 
of  the  accidental  and  fortuitous.  Interest  in  problem  of  varia- 
tion. Issue  among  biologists  regarding  its  explanation.  Syn- 
thesis of  Natural  Science  and  Metaphysics  in  field  of  organic 
movements.  Relation  of  biological  categories  to  the  funda- 
mental concepts  of  Physics;  ground  and  phenomena — matter 
and  motion.  Qualitative  difference  of  character.  Two  prob- 
lems. (1)  The  extent  to  which  the  qualitative  character  of 
Biology  transforms  it  into  a  teleological  science.  (2)  Vital 
connection  between  Biological  Science  and  the  Metaphysical 
interpretation  of  the  world,         ....  pp.  187-214 

CHAPTER  IV. 

CONSCIOUS    ACTIVITY. 

Consciousness  the  medium  of  all  that  is  knowable  or  conceivable. 
Consciousness  and  real  existence.  Examination  of  esse  est 
per  dpi.  Esse  est  concipi; — why  the  real  existent  is  not  ex- 
hausted in  either.  Our  perceptions  and  conceptions  both 
symbols  of  real  existence.  The  tree  on  the  campus.  Primary 
and  secondary  qualities.  The  percept-object  and  the  concept- 
object:  the  latter  more  fundamental  to  real  existence. 
Reason  for  this.     Cognition  develops  symbols  of  the  object  of  a 


CONTENTS.  xiii 

deeper  experience.  Question  as  to  the  nature  of  this  object — is 
it  knowable?  Method  by  which  consciousness  realizes  the  world 
of  existents.  The  plain  man  and  the  specialist, — the  issue  that 
arises.  How  far  the  plain  man  is  reliable;  wherein  mistaken. 
Double  character  of  perception.  As  a  process, — the  interpreta- 
tion of  signals  from  the  world  of  existence  in  terms  of  the  sym- 
bols of  a  collective  experience.  Relation  of  the  concept-elements 
to  perception.  Formal  elements  which  (1)  extend  and  (2)  trans- 
form the  world  of  experience.  Introduce  system  and  universality, 
thus  translating  the  dog's  world  into  the  world  of  Science.  The 
whole  of  cognition  a  symbolizing  process.  Greater  reality-value 
of  conception.  The  percept — a  mediate  result  of  an  act  of  will. 
The  concept-activity  the  persistence  of  the  will-act  itself.  Con- 
nection between  momentary  activity  of  will  in  perception  and  its 
persistent  activity  in  reflection.  Cognition  a  mediating  sym- 
bolizing process  through  which  agencies  of  an  underlying  world 
of  reality  are  enabled  to  interact,        ...        pp.  215-235 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE    MENTAL    AND    PHYSICAL. 

The  solidarity  of  Mental  and  Physical  movements.  Problem  of 
connection.  Not  a  transaction  betweeen  consciousness  and 
wave-movements.  These  symbols  of  deeper  existent.  The  real 
terms,  volitional  activity  and  the  activity  of  an  existent  sym- 
bolized in  wave-movements.  Cases  of  the  connection;  (1)  be- 
tween the  objective  stimulus  and  the  movement  in  consciousness 
which  it  occasions;  (2)  special  relation  between  brain-movements 
and  consciousness,  in  cognition.  The  doctrine  of  Parallelism. 
The  question  of  fact.  Its  interpretation — mistake  of  Hume  and 
the  plain  man.  Case  of  will  and  external  movement.  No  direct 
causal  connection  between  symbolic  physical  movements  and  the 
real  volitional  activity.  Faith  of  Science  in  justified,  (1)  be- 
cause it  is  found  to  work  as  a  basis  of  Psychological  procedure; 
(2)  the  connection  is  uniform.  Case  of  "brain  event"  and  sen- 
sation. Both  terms  symbolic.  No  causal  connection  between  two 
sets  of  symbols  which  spring  from  a  common  origin.  The  real 
connection  deeper — which  the  psycho-physical  parallelism  sym- 
bolizes. Case  of  the  tree  and  the  volitional  reaction.  The 
suggestion  of  agency  between  the  real  which  underlies  the 
physical  symbols  and  the  real  in  consciousness.  These  not  so 
different  in  nature  as  to  preclude  interaction.  The  Meta- 
physical  question — the   ultimate   construction  to   be   put   on   the 


xiv  CONTENTS. 

nature  of  these  interacting  agents.  The  necessary  implication 
of  community  of  nature.  Eeasoning  from  known  to  unknown, 
reach  conclusion  that  all  existents  are  at  bottom  psychic. 
Grounds  of  this  conclusion.  How  it  grounds  the  procedure  of 
Science — the  world  of  existents,  ...  pp.   236-261 

CHAPTER  VI. 

SOCIAL    ACTIVITIES. 

A. — The  Social  Individual. 
Importance  of  Psychological  study  of  social  phenomena.  Germs  of 
the  social  found  in  the  animal — if  not  lower.  The  social  a 
practical  activity  in  which  will  is  central.  This  the  genus. 
What  is  specifically  involved  in  the  social  situation;  (1)  a 
plurality  of  social  units;  these  must  be  socially  interesting  or 
desirable.  Everything  desires  its  Tcind.  Problem  of  the  origin 
of  the  individual  socius.  Eise  of  the  social  consciousness  exem- 
plified, (1)  analytically,  (2)  genetically.  The  cardinal  self  and 
the  different  strata  of  sociality.  The  genetic  problem.  The 
germinal  self.  The  social  environment — its  nature  and  func- 
tion. Social  heredity — its  function.  Forms  of  adaptive  move- 
ment by  which  genetic  results  are  attained  —  Imitation  — 
Association.  The  circular  process  of  imitation.  First  objective, 
then  subjective.  Illustration  of  the  boy  using  the  carpenter's 
tools.  How  the  social  vindicates  itself  as  an  essential  element 
in  the  self.  How  the  boy  learns  how  the  carpenter  feels  by  first 
traveling  by  imitation  through  the  carpenter's  experience  and 
learning  how  he  himself  feels.  The  last  step  a  kind  of  analog- 
ical inference.  How  the  primacy  of  self-consciousness  is  con- 
served in  this  process, — while  it  gives  rise  through  imitation 
and  association  to  a  result  genuinely  social.  The  problem 
investigated  here — how  the  individual  becomes  a  socius  and  the 
mode  of  his  response  to  social  relations.  The  stuff  of  sociality, 
(1)  its  cognitive  factor,  (2)  the  factor  of  interest — sympathetic 
or  antipathetic.  Sociality  includes  hates  and  antagonisms  as 
well  as  loves  and  sympathies.  Further  investigation  belongs  to 
the  problem  of  the  social  community,         .         .         pp.  262-283 

CHAPTER  VII. 
SOCIAL    ACTIVITIES. 

B. — The  Social   Community. 
The  two  essentials  of  the  doctrine  of  the  social  individual.     Basis  of 
the   social   community.     Sense   of  Kind — How   it  is   arrived   at. 


CONTENTS.  xv 

What  it  involves — Sameness  of  the  feeling-reactions  of  other 
conscious  units  with  our  own.  Includes  plurality  of  con- 
scious units  in  sympathetic  and  antipathetic  relations.  In- 
clusion but  subordination  of  the  antipathetic.  Illustration  of 
the  workman  who  stands  out  against  strike.  Selfishness  and 
sociality.  The  Social  Medium.  Illustration  of  pebbles  and 
sand.  This  medium  as  Communal  Mind;  including  Com  nut  mil 
Intelligence  as  principle  of  progress  and  Communal  Memory  as 
principle  of  conservation.  These  terms  stand  for  common  re- 
actions of  individual  consciousnesses  in  groups.  The  commonalty 
of  the  social  medium — called  Publicity.  The  Matter  of  Social 
Organization — not  pure  intelligence — but  thought  saturated  with 
social  interest  and  will, — the  concrete  social  impulse  itself  will- 
informed  and  guided  by  intelligence.  Mode  of  realizing, — imi- 
tation. Eeaction  upon  a  self -thought  situation,  the  genus.  The 
differentia  is  'publicity:  its  nature, — how  it  operates.  The  social 
forces,  (1)  individual,  (2)  communal.  Dependence  of  Sociology 
on  Psychology.  Distinctive  function  of  the  community  itself — 
Different  from  a  mob.  A  law  of  social  aggregation — the  height- 
ening of  individual  spontaneity.  A  law  of  tendency.  Indi- 
vidual and  communal  forces  both  contribute  to  the  growth  of 
publicity.  Nature  of  the  social  forces — sentiments  rather  than 
abstract  ideas.  Functions  of  the  social  forces.  The  Nehr stand, 
Wehrstand  and  Lehrstand.  Development  of  social  organisms. 
Forces  as  conscious  motors.  Social  evolution — dependence  on 
individual  variation.  Growing  complexity  of  organ  and  func- 
tion. Social  selection.  Heredity  its  nature  and  function  as  a 
social  category.  How  social  heredity  becomes  continuous.  Con- 
tinuity and  direction  of  social  progress,      .      .      .      pp.  284-311 

CHAPTER.  VIII. 

THE    SOCIAL    SYNTHESIS. 

Eestatement  of  conclusions.  How  far  Sociology  may  be  treated 
under  the  rubrics  of  Natural  Science  and  natural  causation. 
Instability  of  sociological  units.  Bearing  of  this  on  causation 
— its  genetic  form  embodying  itself  in  the  genetic  judgment. 
Bearing  of  the  conscious  nature  of  social  units.  Determines 
them  as  fundamentally  teleological.  Why  social  phenomena  do 
not  fall  completely  outside  the  scope  of  natural  causation. 
Illustration  of  the  Spanish-American  war.  Function  of  pre- 
vision and  purpose  in  ordinary  social  movements.  Eeflection 
and  social  progress.  Social  phenomena  in  the  mass  open  to 
treatment  as  Natural  Science,  but  not  to  the  exclusion  of  con- 


xvi  CONTENTS. 

scious  character  of  phenomena.  Plea  of  the  pure  phenomenalist 
and  the  fatalist.  Function  of  reflective  variation — tends  to  lift 
social  movements  out  of  category  of  natural  causation,  yet 
movements  as  a  whole  (world-movements)  tend  to  transcend 
human  foresight  and  purpose  and  fall  as  a  whole  under  the 
domain  of  natural  forces.  Out  of  this  grows  the  special  prob- 
lem of  Metaphysics.  (1)  The  function  of  the  social  ideal — how 
it  lifts  social  movements  into  sphere  of  finality.  (2)  Place  of 
the  individual  in  the  social  economy — Social  community  resolva- 
ble into  individual  agents.  The  initiative  an  individual  function. 
The  individual  as  the  end  of  the  social.  Hence  more  real.  Has 
requirements  that  transcend  the  social.  The  problem  of  final 
unification.  No  solution  by  the  social  consciousness.  The 
world-movements  as  a  whole.  The  final  Synthesis  in  which  the 
world-movements  as  a  whole  are  conceived  as  organized  and 
guided  by  an  alFcomprehending  Thought  or  Purpose.  Conclu- 
sion of  this  part.  Summary  of  the  argument  culminating  in 
the  postulate  of  an  Eternal  Consciousness  as  the  bearer  of  pur- 
pose of  the  world-movements  as  a  whole,       .        .      pp.  312-335 


PART   II. 
SYNTHESIS. 

DIVISION   B. 
FROM  SOCIALITY  TO  RELIGION. 

CHAPTER    I. 

ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES. 

Relation  of  the  ethical  to  the  social, — a  phase  of  the  social.  Func- 
tion of  the  reflective  consciousness.  Ethical  ideals  distinguished 
from  the  ordinary  social  by  their  autJioritativeness.  Funda- 
mental concepts — Ought — Right — Good.  Elements  of  obligation; 
(1)  an  ideal  of  conduct,  (2)  assent  of  will.  Its  unconditional 
character  works  out  in  connection  with  special  acts  before  it 
becomes  general.  Relation  of  the  social  judgment  of  approval 
and  disapproval  to  the  Ethical, — is  its  genus  but  does  not  give 
the  differentia.  Theory  of  objective  control  as  ground  of 
imperativeness — its  partial  validity, — not  wholly  adequate. 
Deeper  analysis.     Illustration  of  groups  a,  o,  c  and  x,  y,  z.     Rise 


CONTENTS.  xvii 

of  sense  and  idea  of  justice; — its  nature — the  voice  of  the 
equating  social  consciousness  requiring  that  all  units  shall  share 
equally  in  the  common  life  and  interest.  Kise  of  Truthfulness. 
Illustration.  Standard  of  legitimate  expectation — a  fundamental 
form  of  publicity.  The  lie  a  direct  breach  of  this  form 
of  publicity;  as  such  receives  the  immediate  anathema  of  the 
social  consciousness.  The  fundamental  virtues  constitutional 
forms  of  sociality.  Distinction  between  obligation  and  right; 
between  right  and  good.  Social  good  and  ethical  good.  The 
morally  good  man.  Account  from  the  standpoint  of  genetic 
psychology.  The  private  and  the  social  selves.  Assent  of  the 
former  to  the  demands  of  the  latter  as  obligatory.  The  ultra- 
social  roots  or  implications  of  Ethics.  Subject  of  Ethics  the 
real  self  in  experience — not  the  phenomenal  self.  The  tran- 
scendent reference  of  Ethics — to  some  divine  selfhood  like  the 
God  of  religion; — implies  a  consciousness" that  comprehends  the 
whole.  Only  this  can  cure  relativity.  Ultimate  problems  of 
Ethics.  Freedom.  Ethical  choice  as  vera  causa — illustration. 
Examination  of  claims  of  naturalism.  Freedom  a  type  of  all 
the  fundamental  ethical  categories.  Ethics  grounded  in  last 
analysis  in  the  ultra-social pp.  339-336 


CHAPTER    II. 

THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS. 

Ethical  individualism  and  pluralism.  Its  proof.  Its  first  pre- 
supposition— sociality.  Eelatedness  essential.  Method  in 
Ethics.  Is  Ethics  a  natural  Science?  Pivotal  point  in  Ethical 
naturalism,  the  denial  of  freedom.  Is  ethical  choice  a  vera 
causa?  Case  of  man  tempted  to  tell  a  wicked  lie.  Conflict 
between  desire  and  duty.  When  duty  determines  choice 
naturalism  is  exceeded.  Fact  overlooked  by  naturalism — the 
revolution  brought  about  by  reflection; — prescriptive  as  well  as 
prospective.  The  reflective  ideal  as  Ethical,  one  that  points  an 
inhibition  on  natural  desire.  Eeal  ethical  choice  always  a  vera 
causa.  Ethics  a  normative  science  (not  an  art)  as  distinguished 
from  sciences  that  are  material.  A  determination  of  ideals 
rather  than  analysis  of  what  is.  How  far  Ethics  may  be  treated 
as  a  natural  science.  Function  of  natural  causation  arises  out 
of  relation  between  reflection  and  spontaneity.  The  genetic 
aspect  of  Ethics — the  categories  of  evolution.  Ethical  selection. 
Is  all  selection  a  function  of  natural  causation?  Study  of  a 
case  where  a  higher  moral  conception  is  reached.     The  result  not 


i  CONTENTS. 

explained  as  will  determining  itself,  by  the  agreeable,  but 
rather  as  will  determining  itself  by  conscience  or  duty.  The 
assent  a  form  of  accommodation  but  on  an  ideal  plane.  Social 
and  ethical  heredity.  No  congenital  transmission  of  moral 
ideas.  Ethical  heredity  lies  in  sphere  of  tuition  and  free  choice. 
Moral  evolution  nowhere  falls  completely  into  the  category  of 
natural  causation.  Conclusion  as  to  natural  science  of  Ethics. 
Its  limit.  Metaphysics  of  Ethics  arises  in  view  of  outlying 
problems  regarding  the  implications  of  the  ultimate  ethical 
categories.  To  escape  ultimate  contingency  must  postulate  an 
Eternal  Consciousness  as  their  metaphysical  ground.  Another 
metaphysical  implication  arises  in  connection  with  freedom. 
The  logic  of  the  naturalistic  position.  Necessity  of  metaphysi- 
cal grounding  of  freedom  as  a  vera  causa.         .         pp.  367-395 


CHAPTER    III. 

EMOTION  AND  RATIONALITY. 

Distinction  between  pleasure-pain  and  emotion.  Emotional  aspect 
of  secondary  qualities; — appeal  directly  to  feeling.  Emotion — 
the  product  of  a  feeling-idea  that  calls  forth  a  self-reaction 
upon  a  complex  situation,  either  pleasant  or  painful,  as  a  whole. 
Home-sickness — nature  of  the  emotion.  Emotion  the  form  of 
reflective  feeling.  Categories  of  the  emotional  consciousness — 
individuality  and  unity.  Eeduction  of  individuality  to  per- 
sonality. Incorporation  of  the  aesthetic  categories  into  the 
constitution  of  rationality.  Principle  of  rationality  arises  out 
of  a  synthesis  of  thought  and  emotion.  The  two  species  of 
congruity.  These  arise  as  different  reactions  upon  one  world 
of  content.  These  blend  in  category  of  unity.  Personality — 
the  principle  of  individuation  emotionally  determined.  Ration- 
ality includes  synthesis  of  requirements  of  personality  and  unity. 
Statement  of  a  completely  rational  concept  of  reality.  Feeling 
and  emotion  as  factors  in  mental  development.  pp.  396-412 

CHAPTER    IV. 

RELIGION. 

Social  and  ultra-social  character  of  religion.  Feeling  of  trans- 
cendence. Can  it  be  explained  as  result  of  apparitions  or 
dreams    of     dead    ancestors?     These    may    stimulate    but    not 


CONTENTS.  xix 

originate.  The;  psychological  roots  of  Religion.  Intellectual 
germ  of  Religion — original  intellectual  content — Ldea  of  tran- 
scendence. Emotional  root — associated  with  construction  put 
on  the  object.  Secondary  reactions  from  primary  feelings.  The 
sense  of  helplessness.  This  connected  with  the  ethical  root. 
Processes  of  the  religious  consciousness — Personalization  and 
Deification.  Social  ground  or  Religion.  How  springs  out  of 
social  soil.  The  ethical  root  of  Religion — How  it  works  out  in 
connection  with  the  personalizing  and  transcendence  motives. 
The  ethical  not  the  sole  content  of  religion.  Its  emotional  and 
aesthetic  elements.  Mediation  and  unification.  Importance  of 
investigation  of  psychological  grounds  of  Religion,     pp.  413-428 


CHAPTER   V. 

ORIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT. 

Fundamental  relation  of  Religion  to  the  nature  of  man.  Theories  of 
the  origin  of  Religion.  The  anthropological  theory  proper; — that 
of  its  critics  and  opponents.  Statement  of  the  anthropological 
theory.  Examination  and  criticism.  Hypothesis  of  the  primi- 
tive pre-religious  man.  Proposed  hypothesis  of  origin.  Re- 
ligion co-existent  with  reflection  and  the  human  type  of  con- 
sciousness. Objective  precedes  subjective  consciousness.  Func- 
tion of  the  genius  in  the  unique  variation  in  which  Religion 
originates.  How  man  characterizes  the  religious  object.  In- 
adequacy and  relative  value  of  current  explanation.  Distinction 
between  the  theological  and  anthropological  factors  in  develop- 
ment of  Religion.  Sketch  of  development  of  religious  ideas 
among  primitive  men.  Place  of  polytheistic  and  monotheistic 
tendencies  and  conceptions  in  religious  development.  Late 
development  of  the  ethical.  Restatement  of  hypothesis  of 
origin.  Development  of  religious  consciousness  around -two  cen- 
tral ideas — God  and  the  human  soul.  Viewed  in  connection  with 
the  roots  of  Religion.  Importance  of  spiritism  and  animism  in 
developing  idea  of  soul  or  spirit  and  its  survival.  Not  adequate 
to  develop  the  theological  side  of  Religion.  Its  pluralistic  and 
polytheistic  tendency.  Transcendence  involved  fundamentally 
in  the  origin  and  development  of  the  idea  of  God.  Dialectic  of 
tendencies  and  its  manifestations.  Relation  of  the  natural  con- 
ditions   of   Religion   to    the    supernatural.       .       .       pp.    429-458 


xx  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER   VI. 

THE  RELIGIOUS   SYNTHESIS. 

Method  in  Religion.  Problems.  (1)  How  far  may  be  treated 
as  a  natural  science.  (2)  Is  there  a  sphere  for  science  of  Re- 
ligion above  limit  of  natural  causation?  Consideration  of  first 
question; — Religion  as  complicated  with  physical  and  physio- 
logical conditions.  Here  amenable  to  the  psycho-physical 
parallelism.  The  second  question;  insight  from  Sociology  and 
Ethics.  Freedom  as  vera  causa.  May  be  ultra-scientific  aspects 
of  Religion.  The  Metaphysics  of  Religion — to  seek  in  the  great 
fact  of  transcendence.  Nature  of  basal  religious  certitude, — 
immediate  reflective  inference  by  which  the  mind  grasps  the 
object  of  Religion.  Doctrine  of  the  Eternal  Consciousness. 
Roots  of  this;  (1)  the  idea  of  transcendence;  (2)  the  analogy  of 
selfhood.  The  Eternal  Consciousness  as  the  bearer  of  the  divine 
attributes.  The  dialectic  in  reflection  and  in  history.  The 
religious  prophet  and  his  function.  Moments  of  personalization 
and  infinitation.  The  Logos-Idea — nature  and  development. 
Illustrations  from  history.  Mediation — two  different  forms  de- 
termined by  monotheistic  and  polytheistic  tendencies.  Pan- 
theistic tendencies  and  beliefs.  Pantheism  and  monotheism. 
Pantheism  and  polytheism.  Greek  and  Indian  thought,  illustra- 
ting tendency  either  to  personalize  the  deity  or  to  de-personalize 
the  self.  The  dialectic  in  this  field.  Problem  of  religious 
knowledge.  Basis  on  which  God  is  affirmed.  Principles  of 
characterization.  Validity  of  principles  of  self-analogy  and 
transcendence.  Issue  between  agnosticism  and  gnosticism. 
Weakness  of  each.  The  concrete  synthesis.  Gives  rise  to 
dialectical  movement  between  self-analogy  and  transcendence. 
The  dialectic  in  connection  with  origin  and  development  of 
religious  ideas.  Considered  objectively  and  subjectively.  The 
dialectic  as  principle  for  interpretation  of  religious  history. 
Extreme  tendencies  arise  from  abstract  operation  of  single 
principle.     The  true  law  of  religious  development.       pp.  459-488 

CHAPTER  VII. 

PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS. 

Restatement  of  law  of  religious  evolution.  Theory  of  origin 
critically  considered.  Stages  of  development  in  view  of  polythe- 
istic    and     monotheistic     tendencies.     Special     examination     of 


CONTENTS.  xxi 

Hebra-Hellenism  and  Hinduism.  Brahmanism,  Buddhism  and 
Christianity.  Philosophical  conclusions.  Some  fundamental 
ideas  in  Eeligion.  The  idea  of  God  as  central  in  Religion. 
Idea  of  the  human  soul  as  a  spirit.  Mediation  in  Religion,  its 
relative  and  ideal  forms.  What  ideal  mediation  involves. 
Treatment  in  various  Religions.  Sin  and  Salvation.  Immortal- 
ity: its  place  in  various  Religions.  Relation  to  monotheistic  and 
polytheistic  movements  in  Religion.  Consideration  of  problem 
postponed. pp.  489-515 

CHAPTER   VIII. 

INDIVIDUAL    AND   ETERNAL. 

Plurality  and  sociality.  The  ultra-social-transcendent  being  of 
religion.  The  Eternal  Consciousness, — its  existence;  held  on 
basis  of  immediate  reflective  inference.  Metaphysically  neces- 
sary as  subject  of  all-comprehending  thought-purposes.  Re- 
lation to  a  pluralistic  world  of  existents.  In  its  general  relation 
to  things  is  principle  of  unification.  How  related  to  individual 
existents;  through  the  splitting  up  and  specialization  of  the  one 
thought-purpose  into  individual  thought  purposes.  Illustration. 
Relation  of  individual  selves  to  the  Eternal.  Real  existence  of 
selves.  Their  relation  to  other  existents  in  the  pluralistic  system. 
Interpenetration — how  achieved.  The  more  profound  problem 
that  of  the  relation  of  individual  existents  to  the  Eternal.  The 
instituting  and  conserving  function  of  the  Eternal  does  not  in- 
volve identity.  How  the  one  is  necessary  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  many.  Modus  of  the  relation.  The  finite  individual  not 
merely  a  specialized  purpose  of  the  Absolute;  but  rather  an 
existent; — what  this  specialized  purpose  means  or  intends.  Is 
capable  of  having  its  own  thoughts  and  purposes.  Agency  of 
the  finite  individual  as  related  to  that  of  the  Eternal.  Relation 
of  inclusion.  How  individual  purposes  may  be  defeated  or 
realized  without  rendering  the  purpose  of  the  whole  contingent. 
Perdurability  of  the  individual  self.  Man's  freedom  in  relation 
to  the  Eternal.  The  doctrine  of  immortality  in  the  history  of 
Religion.  Grounds  for  rational  belief  in  immortality.  Ethica] 
and  religious  considerations pp.  516-532 

CHAPTER   IX. 

SIN  AND  RETRIBUTION. 

Natural  good  and  evil  as  satisfaction  or  perdition  of  satisfaction  in 
the  pursuit   of  life.     Natural   and   ultra-natural   good;    one   im- 


CONTENTS. 

pulse-determined;  the  other  determined  by  ideals:  becomes  re- 
straint Oil  impulse  or  desire.  Highest  realization  of  ultra- 
oatural  good  in  sphere  of  Ethics  and  Eeligion.  The  correspond- 
ing species  of  evil.  Species  of  evil ; — pain,  suffering,  accident, 
poverty,  disease,  death.  Remediable  character  of  natural  evil. 
Moral  evil.  The  idea  of  sin — not  that  of  ordinary  moral  trans- 
gression but  involves  more  distinctively  the  personal  relation;  a 
religious  rather  than  an  ethical  idea.  Profundity  of  man's 
sinfulness,  if  he  be  sinful  at  all.  Congenital  roots.  Historical 
origin  of  sin  is  bound  up  in  the  origin  of  the  sense  of  Religion. 
I  low  the  sense  of  sin  would  develop  in  the  feeling  of  having 
offended  or  disobeyed  one  who  has  the  power  and,  ethically,  the 
right  to  command.  Retribution — its  close  relation  to  the  sense 
of  sin.  History  of  the  idea  of  retribution,  (1)  in  the  animistic 
Religions,  (2)  in  the  more  ethical  and  monotheistic  Religions. 
How  the  difference  arises  between  theories  of  transmigration 
and  metempsychosis  on  the  one  hand  and  more  individual  and 
spiritual  theories  on  the  other  hand.  Doctrine  of  the  Founder  of 
Christianity.  The  sense  of  sin  and  the  fearful  looking  for  of 
judgment.     The  latter   not   a  necessary   accompaniment. 

pp.   533-554 


PART  III. 
DEDUCTIONS. 

CHAPTER   I. 

PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE. 

Relation  of  knowledge  to  the  practical.  Natural  Science  and  agency. 
Its  law  of  agency — natural  causation.  Subordination  of  mind 
to  matter.  Scope  of  Science.  How  it  meets  the  demand  for 
knowledge.  Philosophy  includes  Science  in  its  synthesis. 
Science  as  a  vital  element  in  experience.  Metaphysics  as  an 
organ  of  experience.  Dependence  of  Metaphysics  on  experience 
for  its  doctrine  of  reality.  Reason  the  voice  of  experience  as  a 
whole.  Test  of  its  judgments — Congruity.  Standard  of  con- 
gruity;  (1)  proximately,  the  generalized  social  experience; 
(2)  ultimately,  an  experience  that  is  all-complete  and  divine. 
The  necessary  implication  of  an  Absolute  in  experience 
Grounds  of  its  intelligibility.  Difficulty  Avith  agnosticism — its 
dualistic    isolation    of    the    transcendent    from    experience.     The 


CONTENTS.  xxiii 

consciousness  of  our  own  finite  contains  the  implication  of  the 
Infinite  and  Absolute.  Only  one  Eternal  Being.  Method  of 
rationalism  untenable  in  so  far  as  it  rests  on  the  a  priori. 
Synthesis  of  the  Lockian  and  Kantian  principles.  Mode  by 
which  experience  effects  a  synthesis  of  the  sensational  and 
rational  in  knowledge.  The  knowledge-process  as  involved  in 
the  larger  concrete  of  experience.  Metaphysics  a  final  doctrine 
of  experience  as  a  whole, — in  terms  of  idea  and  purpose, — under 
guidance  of  a  principle  that  is  the  organ  of  experience  in  its 
completeness pp.  557-578 


CHAPTER    II. 

NATUEE. 

The  plain  man  and  the  Berkeleyan  concept  of  Nature.  His  loss 
of  faith  in  view  of  the  revelations  of  science.  How  his  con- 
fidence is  restored.  Solid  grounding  of  the  world  in  experience. 
Problems  of  Nature.  First,  its  origin  in  experience.  Emerges 
from  the  social  as  that  part  of  our  world  that  is  relatively  in- 
dependent of  our  ordinary  social  reactions.  How  it  becomes 
differentiated.  Stages  in  the  process.  Space  and  time.  Time 
the  dynamic  category.  Prime  requisites  of  Nature.  Uniformity 
and  stability.  The  uniformity  of  Nature — Mill's  doctrine — its 
value,  but  inadequate.  Deeper  reason  than  past  behavior  of 
Nature.  Eeal  ground  teleological.  Demand  for  a  fitting  back- 
ground for  the  fundamental  purpose  of  living.  The  uniformity 
we  predict  is  the  congruity  of  its  movements  with  the  funda- 
mental aims  of  life.  The  opposite  of  this  irrational.  Stability 
of  Nature — this  goes  deeper — involves  maintenance  of  self- 
identity.  Involves  system  in  the  world  as  an  internal  possession. 
Negates  a  plurality  of  non-coordinated  centres  of  movements. 
Function  of  Metaphysics  to  develop  implications  of  this  internal 
system.  Does  it  involve  an  infinite,  all-comprehending  purpose 
as  the  co-ordinating  principle  of  a  plurality  of  finite  purposes? 
Relation  of  Nature  to  God.  The  question  of  fact  and  the 
question  of  method.  Naturalism  in  its  dynamic  form  as  a 
principle  of  evolution.  Doctrine  of  nature  as  a  self-developing 
system.  Examination  of  this  (1)  in  the  purely  physical  sphere, 
(2)  in  the  world  of  organisms.  Supplies  no  intelligible  ground 
for  initiation,  Selection  or  direction.  Nature  cannot  be  denied 
a  teleological  character.  Need  of  a  metaphysical  ground  or 
first  principle.  God  as  this  first  principle.  The  mechanical 
rooted   in   the   teleological.     Nature   divinely   grounded.     Nature 


CONTENTS. 

and  evolution.  How  evolution  negates  a  species  of  teleology 
but  is  consistent  with  a  profounder  species.  Involves  the  relation 
of  God  to  Nature.  Man  and  the  divinely  conditioned  process  of 
evolution.     Evolution  and  revelation — the   Miracle,     pp.   579-603 


CHAPTER    III. 

IDEA  OF  GOD. 

The  idea  of  God  in  its  origin  and  development.  General  sources 
of  the  idea  of  God  in  experience.  Special  source  in  the  re- 
ligious consciousness.  Distinction  between  the  philosophical  and 
the  religious  ideas  of  God  in  origin  and  early  stages  of  develop- 
ment. Coalescence  into  one.  What  the  conception  of  God 
involves:  (1)  an  intelligent  norm,  (2)  a  principle  of  tran- 
scendence. The  norm  found  in  selfhood.  Use  of  the  self-anal- 
ogy; is  the  principle  of  intelligible  definition.  How  anthropo- 
morphism is  avoided.  Qualification  at  every  step  by  the  principle 
of  transcendence.  Gives  rise  to  the  process  of  infinitation. 
How  it  modifies  the  conception  and  the  attributes  of  God.  God's 
Reality.  Does  not  exist  phenomenally.  The  rationally  necessary 
Being.  Question  of  reality  mainly  one  of  value.  The  idea  of 
God  fulfills  a  necessary  requirement  of  our  experience.  This 
the  special  Metaphysical  consideration.  Also  ideally  fulfills 
aesthetic.  Ethical  and  religious  demands.  Union  of  the  two 
sets  of  considerations.  Thirdly;  the  idea  of  God  as  embodied  in 
the  Christ  fulfills  the  need  in  our  experience  of  a  Divine  Helper 
and  Redeemer.  Lastly  a  test  of  the  reality  of  the  being  we  call 
God  will  be  found  in  his  ability  to  ideally  harmonize  and  complete 
all  the  other  real  interests  of  man's  nature.  Relation  of  God 
to  the  world.  The  thought  of  God  the  intellectual  prius  of  the 
world.  The  purpose  of  God  grounds  the  origin  and  productivity 
or  development  of  the  world.  God  as  first  cause  and  unifier  of 
the  world.  God  and  man.  Two  questions  (1)  Relation  to  man's 
origin,  (2)  to  his  being  and  activity.  The  first  question  in- 
volves God's  relation  to  the  concrete  nature  of  man.  Man  as  a 
product  of  Nature  and  evolution  and  yet  a  child  of  God.  God 's 
relation  to  man's  being — constitutes  him  after  the  fundamental 
type  of  his  own  nature.  But  with  a  difference; — reversal  of  the 
principle  of  transcendence.  Relation  to  man's  activity.  Real 
individuality  and  agency  of  man.  The  Divine  and  human 
agencies pp.  604-626 


CONTENTS.  xxv 

CHAPTER    IV. 

NATUEE  OF  MAN. 

The  naturalistic  theory — man  a  product  of  perishable  nature.  Facts 
to  support  this.  Other  facts  drawn  from  man's  ideals  and 
achievements.  The  painful  contradiction  that  arises.  Is  there 
any  rational  solution?  Answer  in  three  parts.  What  Science 
teaches  regarding  man's  nature.  Fault  of  the  old  psychology. 
The  new  psychology  and  its  social  intuition.  Lesson  of  genetic 
psychology;  of  anthropology.  The  other  side  of  the  represen- 
tation. Vision  of  the  introspective  psychologist, — restoration  of 
the  self  to  its  rights.  Man  asserting  himself  as  an  individual. 
Problems  of  individuality.  (1)  The  nature  of  the  individual; 
(2)  its  evolution  in  experience,  (3)  grounds  of  its  maintenance. 
The  common  and  the  unique  in  experience.  The  whole  of  ex- 
perience a  process  in  which  man  comes  into  possession  of  himself 
and  his  world.  Individuality  itself  supplies  the  principle  of 
conservation  and  maintenance.  Its  categories.  Persists  through 
changes  of  form  and  of  content; — defiance  of  time-gap. 
Heredity  and  maintenance.  Function  of  education.  The  en- 
vironment and  the  individual.  Man's  relation,  (1)  to  Nature 
viewed  in  the  light  of  teleology.  Man  the  product  of  a  divinely 
grounded  and  ordered  Nature,  (2)  Man's  relation  to  God — 
through  his  purposes  and  ideals  included  in  a  Divine  order. 

pp.  627-652 

CHAPTER   V. 

FEEEDOM  AND  DESTINY. 

The  double  lesson  of  experience.  The  Kantian  dilemma  as  to 
freedom  and  natural  determination.  How  it  is  resolved. 
Natural  determination  and  freedom  related  as  that  which  is  to 
that  which  is  to  be.  The  connecting  link — ideal  purpose. 
Man's  power,  (1)  in  his  relation  to  Nature.  Position  of  the 
materialistic  determinist;  importance  of  the  truth  he  asserts — 
man's  enslavement.  What  the  materialistic  determinist  over- 
looks. Man's  power  of  self-help  through  choice  of  ideals.  The 
appeal  of  the  philanthropist  and  the  home-missionary.  Freedom 
as  man's  power  to  conceive  ideal  purposes  and  to  put  forth 
efforts  for  their  realization.  Testimony  of  consciousness. 
Freedom    not    static.      Man    becomes    free    by    putting    forth 


CONTENTS. 

teleological  effort  toward  the  realization  of  ideals.  Man's 
power  in  relation  to  God.  The  fatalistic  Theologian  and  his 
claim.  Suppresses  freedom  in  behalf  of  sovereignty.  The 
divine  purpose  as  constitutive  of  the  very  individuality  which  the 
fatalist  suppresses.  How  God  is  absolute  sovereign  and  yet 
the  individual — even  the  wicked  man — free  to  realize  his 
purposes.  The  question  of  possibility  the  only  one  open.  The 
pantheistic  interpretation — due  to  a  confusion  of  thought  and 
not  necessary.  Destiny  of  man.  Conclusion  influenced  by  con- 
ception of  freedom.  Grounds  out  of  which  problem  of  destiny 
arises.  (1)  The  perishability  of  man.  Counsel  of  the  sages. 
What  this  picture  of  life  leaves  out  of  the  representation.  The 
divine  side  of  life.  The  ideal  of  life  as  continuous  and  pro- 
gressive— a  struggle  to  realize  an  infinite  ideal.  Synthesis  of 
the  two  aspects.  How  it  becomes  a  teleological  process.  The 
proofs  of  immortality  considered  on  this  basis.  Eeview  of  the 
two-sided  picture; — its  blended  truth.  Out  of  his  concrete  con- 
ditions springs  both  man's  freedom  and  his  struggle  to  realize 
his  own  true  life-ideals  as  a  participant  in  the  life  of  the 
Divine pp.    653-680 


CHAPTER   VI. 

MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT. 

Idea  of  the  environment;  its  forces,  ordinary  and  transcendent. 
Man  influenced  by  nature;  by  his  human  environment.  His 
servitude  a  tutelage  of  freedom.  Transcendent  forces  of  man's 
environment.  Sense  of  the  transcending  in  the  moral  and  re- 
ligious consciousness  as  source  of  aspirations  and  spiritual  re- 
actions. Man's  business,  to  determine  his  place  in  the  system 
and  work  out  his  destiny.  The  life-ideal  that  emerges  out  of 
man 's  struggles.  Through  this  effort  he  comes  into  normal 
relations  with  the  good  and  evil.  The  notion  of  evil.  Man's 
power  of  choosing  ideals.  In  presence  of  opposite  ideals.  The 
ideal  of  a  complete  life  as  the  goal  of  experience.  This  ideal 
compared  with  that  of  self-realization.  Evil  that  which  thwarts 
or  opposes  the  realization  of  the  complete  life.  Man's  re- 
lation to  the  system  of  things  determined  by  this  ideal  of  living. 
Man  the  worker-out  of  his  own  destiny.  His  need  of  nourishing 
Nature;  of  his  fellow  men  and  of  God.  Need  of  the  Divine 
helpfulness  as  assurance  that  his  own  life  shall  not  fail  and  that 
it  may  endure.         .......         pp.  681-703 


CONTENTS.  xxvii 

SUPPLEMENTARY    CHAPTER. 

MAN  AND  HIS  BELIEFS. 

Idea  of  Philosophy  involves  unification  of  knowledge  and  belief. 
The  will  to  believe;  Considered  (1)  as  to  its  limit,  (2)  as  to  its 
validity.  Inadequacy  of  mere  will  to  believe.  The  test  of  com- 
monalty, what  it  involves.  The  postulate  of  Practical  Eeason 
as  conceived  by  Kant.  Examples:  freedom,  belief  in  God,  im- 
mortality. The  principle  involved.  How  qualified  by  theoretic 
considerations.  Must  be  completely  rational;  that  is,  the 
theoretic  justification  must  be  formally  satisfactory.  Synthesis 
of  the  demand  of  will  with  formal  justification  of  theoretic 
reason.     Here  the  will  to  believe  becomes  organ  of  the  highest 

certitude pp.    704-714 

APPENDIX  A pp.    715-717 

APPENDIX  B p.    718 


PREFACE 

The  doctrine  of  this  book  is  that  consciousness,  when  ade- 
quately conceived,  is  the  great  reality.  This  doctrine  can 
be  maintained,  however,  only  when  consciousness  is  iden- 
tified with  the  energy  or  activity  that  becomes  aware 
of  itself  and  its  object,  and  not  simply  with  that  awareness 
itself.  Consciousness  is  not  merely  an  awareness,  but  is 
rather,  the  being  that  performs  that  function.  Moreover,  con- 
sciousness is  the  bearer  of  a  deeper  function ;  namely,  that 
central  effort  of  selfhood  and  will  by  which  experience 
realizes  its  world.  Furthermore,  consciousness  is  conceived 
here  in  its  most  comprehensive  sense  as  including  not  only 
an  activity  that  becomes  aware  of  things  and  of  itself,  but 
also  that  earlier  and  more  primal  activity,  regarded  from 
the  point  of  view  of  a  developing  process,  which  ante- 
dates and  grounds  awareness,  and  may  be  represented  as 
subliminal,  and  not  as  yet  aware  of  either  its  object  or 
itself.  This  activity,  which  James  somewhere  calls  scious- 
ness  is  taken  here  to  be  of  the  same  type  as  that  which  acts 
as  conscious  function,  higher  up  in  the  scale.  It  is  conceived 
as  the  embodiment  of  the  energy  which  we  call  physical  and 
as  working  out  in  the  mechanical  movements  and  categories 
of  physics  and  mathematics.  Physical  movement  con- 
stitutes what  we  call  the  mechanical  stage  of  phenomena, 
while  mathematics  arises  out  of  the  forms  of  space  and  time 
and  number  when  these  have  been  taken  up  by  reflection. 
In  dealing  with  physics  and  mathematics  the  aim  has 
xxix 


XXX  PEEFACE. 

been  not  to  trespass  on  territory  in  which  the  physicist  and 
mathematician  alone  can  tread  with  assurance,  but  rather 
to  confine  the  investigation  to  that  presuppositional  ground- 
work of  these  sciences  which  determines  the  kind  of  a  world 
witli  which  they  set  out  and  in  which  they  are  interested. 
For  this  reason  we  have  little  to  say  regarding  the  more 
refined  conceptions  of  physics,  or  those  later  developments 
of  mathematics  in  which  that  science  bids  fair  to  realize  the 
programme  of  Aristotle  by  breaking  through  the  trammels 
of  the  more  elementary  concepts  of  quantity,  and  occupy- 
ing the  whole  field  of  logic  as  its  proper  domain.  These  fields 
are  not  entered,  but  what  is  here  maintained  is  that  when 
we  penetrate  to  the  first  presuppositions  of  these  sciences 
we  come  upon  the  world-views  which  form  their  points  of 
departure  and  which  we  have  endeavored  to  determine. 

In  prosecuting  this  enterprise,  not  alone  in  connection 
with  physics  and  mathematics,  but  also  in  connection  with 
the  entire  scale  of  sciences  from  physics  to  religion,  we 
have  aimed  to  exemplify  the  cardinal  function  of  phi- 
losophy. We  have  claimed  for  philosophy  the  right  to 
exercise  that  function  of  synthesis  in  which,  through  a 
correlation  of  the  concepts  of  science  and  metaphysics,  a 
real  grounding  and  unification  of  the  whole  field  of  knowl- 
edge may  be  effected.  In  order  to  effect  a  real  synthesis, 
philosophy  must  first  seek  the  principles  of  grounding  in  a 
metaphysical  doctrine  that  shall  fit  in  with  and  complete 
the  presuppositional  bases  of  the  sciences.  Having  accom- 
plished this  task,  it  must  seek  a  real  unification  of  the  world 
by  such  an  organization  of  the  insights  of  science  and  meta- 
physics as  will  achieve  a  fundamental  unity  and  not  a  mere 
eclectic  accommodation.  To  achieve  the  aims  herein  indi- 
cated, has  been  the  inspiration  of  this  prolonged  effort,  the 
success  of  which  remains  to  be  determined  by  the  judgment 
of  those  who  are  competent  to  decide  regarding  the  issues 
involved. 

My  obligations,  which  are  many  and  fundamental,  have 
been  recognized  generally  in  connection  with  the  various 


PREFACE.  xxxi 

topics  discussed.  Further  than  this  it  would  be  impossible 
within  reasonable  limits  to  go.  There  is  one  obligation, 
however,  that  does  not  appear  explicitly  in  the  text, 
and  which  I  wish,  therefore,  to  acknowledge  here.  I  wish 
to  record  my  indebtedness  to  James  Ward,  not  only  for  the 
stimulus  of  his  written  works,  but  also  for  that  of  personal 
intercourse.  The  concepts  of  scientific  terms  which  I  have 
been  led  to  adopt  are  in  some  instances  different  from  his, 
though,  as  I  think,  not  inconsistent  with  them.  Dr.  Ward, 
as  I  understand,  would  limit  the  scope  of  mechanism,  for 
example,  to  mathematical  physics,  whereas  in  these  dis- 
cussions it  has  been  represented  as  co-extensive  with  the 
scope  of  natural  causation.  It  is  with  some  diffidence  that 
I  have  proposed  the  wider  conception. 

I  wish,  also,  to  acknowledge  my  great  indebtedness  to 
my  friend  and  colleague,  Roger  B.  Johnson,  to  whose  pains- 
taking care  in  reading  the  manuscript  and  correcting  the 
sheets  as  they  passed  through  the  press,  this  volume  owes 
its  freedom  from  a  multitude  of  imperfections. 

Alexander  Thomas  Ormond. 

Princeton,  Aug.  21,  1906. 


( i  EN  E  RA  L  INTRODUCTION. 


One  of  the  most  characteristic  features  of  our  time  is  its 
tendency  to  specialism,  affecting  as  it  does  men's  horizons 
as  well  as  the  scope  of  their  activities.  What  we  may 
think  of  this  condition  is  a  matter  of  secondary  moment, 
inasmuch  as  it  is  the  inevitable  outcome  of  the  vast  exten- 
sion of  the  fields  of  possible  knowledge  open  to  the  modern 
mind.  It  is  more  important  to  consider  what  is  to  be  done 
about  it  in  view  of  some  of  the  most  serious  consequences 
it  entails.  These  consequences  are  accustomed  to  show 
themselves  in  two  forms,  one  subjective,  the  other  objective. 
Subjectively  speaking,  most  of  us  have  had  experience  of 
the  fact  that  the  degree  of  concentration  necessary  to  make1 
our  specialty  go  has  had  the  effect  of  diminishing  our  sense 
of  the  value  of  things  that  happen  to  lie  outside  the  limits 
of  our  own  chosen  field.  And  we  are  painfully  aware  that 
this  shrinkage  of  value  is  not  objective,  but  due  wholly  to 
our  own  contracting  vision.  I  sit  in  my  study  for  hours 
with  my  eyes  glued  to  my  manuscript,  or  to  the  experiment 
I  am  conducting,  and  when  I  drop  my  work  and  go  out  into 
the  open,  the  heavens  are  a  blur  and  the  landscape  a  mottled 
page  wdiose  objects  are  hardly  distinguishable.  It  takes 
time  to  readjust  my  optics  to  the  requirements  of  the  far 
as  well  as  the  near.  The  effect  in  the  field  of  mental  effort 
is  that  my  intellectual  vision  is  contracted  and  I  am  led  to 
become  the  partisan  of  some  narrow  epistemological  creel : 
or,  if  my  temperament  be  that  of  a  Hume,  my  punishment 


o  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

will  come  upon  me  in  the  form  of  a  reaction  that  whelms 
my  own  point  of  land  with  the  rest  of  the  continent,  in 
scepticism. 

Objectively,  this  eclipse  of  mental  vision  has  led  to 
divisions,  collisions,  disintegrations,  and,  in  the  end,  too 
often  to  a  total  disbelief  in  knowledge  and  to  a  fruitful 
crop  of  negative  dogmatics.  In  the  first  place  the  tradi- 
tional conflict  between  physics  and  metaphysics  has  become 
more,  instead  of  less,  uncompromising,  the  latter  meeting 
the  open  contempt  of  the  former  with  a  good  measure  of 
scorn  in  return.  Again,  philosophy  and  science  find  them- 
selves at  odds,  each  vehemently  discounting  the  methods 
and  results  of  the  other.  Moreover,  religion  and  secular- 
ism beg  leave  to  join  the  chorus,  each  lifting  up  its  voice 
in  testimony  against  the  other.  The  culturists  are  also  like 
a  house  divided  against  itself,  the  poets  and  the  logicians 
refusing  to  lie  down  together,  while  the  humanists  and  the 
naturalists  despitefully  use  one  another.  Like  the  ancient 
Jews  and  Samaritans,  the  physiologists  and  the  introspec- 
tive psychologists  will  have  no  dealings,  while  the  episte- 
mologists  and  theologians  find  themselves  on  opposite  sides 
of  the  fence  of  knowledge.  And  even  within  the  four 
corners  of  a  single  science  the  specialists  in  one  field  look 
down  with  hearty  contempt  upon  those  workers  in  a  differ- 
ent quarter  who  refuse  to  pronounce  their  shibboleth. 

Accompanying  this  narrowing  of  sympathy  and  per- 
spective, we  find  a  tendency  to  lose  and  confuse  the  sense 
of  values.  While  structurists  and  fnnctionists  are  fighting 
out  their  issue  to  a  finish,  and  while  the  feud  between  the 
srimental  and  introspective  psychologists  sometimes 
threatens  a  vendetta,  men  are  generally  either  losing  their 
i  of  relative  values  and  becoming  sceptical  indiffer- 
ent ists,  or,  forgetting  that  there  may  be  different  kinds  of 
value,  they  seize  upon  one  of  the  many  species  and  endeavor 
to  make  it  absolute  and  exclusive. 

For  this  reason  we  have  the  air  filled  with  the  din  of  the 
conflict  between  pragmatists  and  rationalists,  while  in  the 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION.  3 

field  of  metaphysical  ultimates  there  is  a  drawn  battle 
between  the  phiralists  and  what  we  may  call,  in  view  of  its 
most  noted  advocate,  Royce's  fourth  conception  of  being. 

I  do  not  overlook  the  fact  that  there  is  a  certain  sense 
of  humor  pervading  all  this  vaporing  and  conflict,  or  that 
a  measure  of  the  apparent  difference  may  be  ascribed  to 
that  spirit  of  good-natured  chaff  which  is  apt  to  mark  the 
intercourse  of  workers  in  adjacent  fields.  No  doubt  when 
we  deduct  something  for  mere  appearance,  a  part  of  the 
evil  disappears  and  we  may  cherish  the  belief  that  men  are 
inwardly  not  so  sceptical  or  so  unresponsive  to  ideals  as  out- 
wardly they  seem  to  be.  But  when  due  allowances  have  been 
made,  it  still  remains  true  that  antagonism  and  chaos  prevail 
to  distressing  degree,  and  that  while  the  Humian  sceptic  is 
not  a  vara  avis  by  any  means,  he  probably  does  not  turn 
up  so  frequently  as  the  one  who  has  simply  lost  his  grip  on 
the  elements  of  culture  as  a  whole,  and  who,  in  a  dazed  sort 
of  way,  is  looking  north  for  his  metaphysics,  south  for  his 
religion,  east  for  his  science,  while  the  west  is  to  him  simply 
a  terra  incognita  of  undefined  terrors. 

In  short,  we  of  the  present  generation  are  paying  the 
natural  penalty  for  our  specialism  in  the  eclipse  of  our 
faith  in  the  unity  of  truth,  and  in  the  tendency  of  the 
elements  of  our  culture  to  break  away  from  our  control 
and  fall  into  a  condition  of  reciprocal  hostility  and  con- 
flict. 

Now,  it  is  not  to  be  expected  that  men,  by  simply  taking 
thought,  will  be  able  to  remedy  such  a  situation.  The  root 
of  the  disease  is  too  deep  for  superficial  remedies.  There 
is  a  gravitation  in  the  centrifugal  direction  which  belongs  to 
the  very  spirit  of  intense  concentration  on  relatively  minute 
fields  which  will  prove  stronger  than  all  our  efforts  to  check 
it  and  keep  it  in  bounds.  The  true  antidote  will  only  be 
found  in  a  discipline  whose  special  business  it  shall  be  to 
investigate  the  grounds  and  principles  of  the  whole  body  of 
truth  with  a  view  to  its  unity  and  meaning  as  a  whole. 
The  very  characterization  of  such  a  task  will,  no  doubt, 


4  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

discredit  it  in  advance  in  the  eyes  of  many.  Nevertheless, 
we  propose  to  push  its  claims  here,  not  only  by  pointing  out 
its  problems,  but  also  the  method  by  which  we  think  its 
solutions  are  to  be  attained.  That  there  is  a  call  for  such 
a  task  need  not  be  argued  after  what  has  been  said  above. 
That  there  is  a  real  problem  left  over  by  the  special  inves- 
tigations  now  in  the  field,  becomes  clear  when  we  remember 
that  the  interest  underlying  each  specialty  is  mainly  con- 
fined to  its  own  things,  and  that  the  result  in  the  whole 
field  of  culture  is  unmediated  confusion.  It  is  no  one's 
business  to  look  after  the  correlation  of  the  elements  and  the 
unity  of  knowledge  as  a  whole.  There  is  no  discipline  which 
takes  its  departure  from  the  sense  of  the  whole,  but  each  is 
actuated  by  the  sense  of  some  part  or  fragment  of  the  whole. 
And  while  it  may  be  true,  as  some  will  object,  that  no  reli- 
able result  can  be  attained  by  proceeding  from  this  point  of 
view,  yet  we  are  justified  in  replying,  at  this  stage  of  our 
inquiry,  that  the  question  of  results  is  one  apart  from  the 
question  of  the  reality  of  the  problem  which  is  to  be  solved. 
That  there  is  a  sense  of  the  whole,  and  that  it  supplies  real 
problems  for  investigation  which  the  special  sciences  do 
not  attempt;  this  is  our  justification  here  for  the  claim  that 
some  investigation  is  called  for  whose  special  business  will 
be  the  occupation  of  this  standpoint  and  the  consideration 
of  these  problems. 

To  this  discipline  we  apply  the  old  name,  philosophy, 
and  we  are  about  to  claim  for  it  the  old  function  of  unifica- 
tion and  the  old  interest  in  the  whole  upon  which  the 
exercise  of  this  function  proceeded.  Now  to  a  discipline 
so  conceived,  what,  we  may  ask,  would  appear  to  be  its  cen- 
tral motive ;  I  mean  the  motive  by  which  it  would  be  led 
to  its  characteristic  results?  And  the  answer,  when  we 
really  understand  the  situation,  will  be,  that  this  motive 
will  be  a  sense  or  a  demand  for  synthesis.  Philosophy  in 
the  very  nature  of  the  case  must  be  synthetic,  and  it  will 
not  abate  from  this  claim  if  it  be  found  that  the  philosopher 
is  called  on  to  wade  through  seas  of  analvsis  in  order  to 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION.  5 

reach  the  data  from  which  his   results  are   determined. 

The  point  of  value  is  that  these  results  are  synthetic  and 
that  the  first  interest  of  philosophy  is  always  synthetic. 
The  spirit  and  the  dominating'  method  of  philosophy  will, 
therefore,  be  synthetic.  It  is  easy  to  make  this  claim, 
however,  and  it  may  be  a  very  different  matter  to  exhibit 
the  situation  in  such  a  way  as  to  show  how  the  synthetic 
character  of  philosophy  arises  and  how  it  is  necessary. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  this  task  that  we  are  about  to  undertake. 
The  synthesis  we  are  advocating-  here  is  not  one  that  has 
its  motive  in  anything  to  be  found  on  the  surface  of  the 
modern  situation.  So  far  as  mere  surface  indications  are 
concerned  nothing  is  needed  but  a  little  of  the  spirit  of 
compromise  and  an  accommodating  eclecticism.  But  phil- 
osophy can  have  no  fellowship  either  with  compromise  or 
eclecticism.  Philosophy,  like  science,  has  truth  in  view 
and  must  go  straight  to  its  goal.  The  prime  motive  for  the 
synthesis  of  philosophy  lies  even  deeper  than  specialism 
itself  and  the  disintegration  it  works.  It  is  to  be  found  in 
a  species  of  dualism  which  affects  the  foundations  of  knowl- 
edge itself,  and  threatens  to  rive  our  world  in  twain.  His- 
torically, the  most  impressive  modern  instance  of  the 
vindication  of  this  function  for  philosophy  is  that  of  the 
deep-thinking  Kant.  Students  of  Kant  are  beginning  to 
see  more  clearly  than  before  the  kind  of  dilemma  he  was 
facing  when  he  achieved  what  he  called  his  Copernican 
revolution.  The  secret  is  wrapped  up  in  the  pre-critical 
period  of  Kant's  development,  the  study  of  which  shows  us 
that  before  the  Copernican  revolution  took  place,  Kant's 
breach  with  the  traditional  rationalism  had  become  final, 
and  no  return  to  it  was  possible.  The  vital  elements  in 
the  situation,  as  he  faced  it,  were :  ( 1 )  The  Newtonian 
physics  with  its  representation  of  an  objective  order  to 
which  consciousness  must  adjust  itself  in  the  effort  of 
knowledge;  (2)  The  English  empiricism  with  its  objec- 
tive order  of  sensations  to  which  thought  must  adjust  itself 
in  the  effort  of  knowledge.     The  two  disciplines  had  this 


6  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

in  common :  both  assumed  the  fixity  of  the  objective  order 
and  the  necessity  that  the  subjective  order  of  thinking 
should  adjust  itself  to  a  predetermined  objective  order. 
Kant  puts  its  tersely.  Previous  thought  had  assumed  thai 
things  are  central  and  that  our  thoughts  must  revolve 
around  them.  But  Kant  proposed  a  reversal  of  the  order, 
making  thought  central  and  putting  the  onus  of  adaptation 
on  things. 

We  cannot  tarry  here  to  interpret  Kant.  But  what 
Kant  saw  that  made  the  revolution  possible  was  something 
of  which  the  empirical  philosophers  had  not  dreamed.  He 
discovered  the  fundamental  relation  of  consciousness  to  the 
world.  And  when  he  denied  the  claim  of  these  objective 
orders  to  be  allowed  to  dictate  to  thought,  he  had  not  in 
mind  to  re-establish  a  subjective  order  like  that  of  Berkeley. 
So  far  as  Berkeley  is  concerned  Kant  was  loyal  to  the  objec- 
tive order.  He  denied  its  claim  of  dictation  because  he 
discovered  that  consciousness  had  been  beforehand  in  the 
business  and  had  constituted  the  very  orders  which  we  call 
objective.  Kant  repudiated  the  dualism  of  previous 
thought;  its  assumption  that  there  is  a  world  wholly  out- 
side of  consciousness,  which  consciousness  must  contemplate 
and  adapt  itself  to;  in  favor  of  a  view  that  makes  con- 
sciousness central  in  its  world  and  the  world  itself  objective 
content  of  consciousness.  That  Kant  did  not  completely 
master  his  own  idea  is  admitted.  But  he  went  far 
enough  to  enable  us  to  grasp  the  real  meaning  of  his 
categories.  They  are  the  modes  of  that  forehanded 
activity  of  consciousness  by  means  of  which  it  constitutes 
the  objective,  and  reduces  its  order  to  the  status  of  its  own 
creation.  If  the  world  is  the  objective  content  of  con- 
sciousness, then  it  follows  that  the  world  must  adapt  itself 
to  the  congenital  constitution  of  consciousness  in  order  to 
get  itself  either  realized  or  known.  The  categories  are  this 
congenital  constitution,  and  the  world,  in  order  to  get  itself 
known  or  realized,  must  first  be  introduced  subjectively  in 
sensation  and  its  order.     These  supply  the  material  of  the 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION.  7 

next  stage  in  which  it  is  fully  objectified  and  lakes  its 
place  as  objective  content  of  consciousness  by  means  of  its 
coalescence  with  these  congenital  functions  of  conscious- 
ness, which  give  it  form  and  relation  and  meaning  as 
elements  of  an  objective  system.     Moreov  dors  not 

dream  that  he  has  been  upsetting  the  standpoinl  of 
natural  science.  He  conceives  that  he  has  been  re-estab- 
lishing it  on  a  firmer  basis  than  the  dualism  on  which  l1 
stood  before.  What  he  fundamentally  intended  he  accom- 
plished, and  that  was  to  establish  the  doctrine  that  while 
in  the  ordinary  activities  of  knowledge  it  is  necessary  for 
us  to  adapt  our  thoughts  to  the  condition  of  things,  yet  this 
superficial  relation  has  its  roots  in  a  more  profound  rela- 
tion in  which  thought,  by  virtue  of  its  congenital  forms, 
really  constitutes  its  world. 

Now  Kant  conceives  the  business  of  philosophy  to  be 
the  exploiting  of  that  profound  synthesis  by  virtue  of 
which  consciousness  asserts  its  primacy  in  the  world  by 
maintaining  its  prerogative  as  the  source  of  the  orders  of 
both  subjective  and  objective  phenomena.  The  Copernican 
revolution  in  astronomy  was  one  that  revolutionized  men's 
conceptions  of  the  material  world  while  leaving  their  per- 
ceptions untouched.  The  Kantian  revolution  in  the  mental 
world  is  one  that,  when  fully  understood,  works  a  revolu- 
tion in  our  conceptional  world,  but  leaves  the  perceptional 
world  unmodified.  In  fact,  the  standpoint  of  natural 
science  remains  as  it  was  before  and  it  is  only  from  the 
philosophical  point  of  view  that  it  requires  a  new  inter- 
pretation. The  vital  point  of  Kant  ism  in  this  connection 
is  found  in  the  fact  that  Kant  has  come  upon  a  dualism  in 
his  world  and  discovers  in  synthesis  the  principle  of  its 
cure. 

Now  the  historic  interpretation  of  Kant  brings  hi  i 
thought  into  close  and  vital  relation  with  the  problem  as  h 
affects  our  present  day  thinking.  The  dualism  of  the 
present  that  hurts  our  thinking  worst  and  that  stands  most 
in  the  path  of  unity  is  that  which  separates  natural  science 


8  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

and  metaphysics.  It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  between 
natural  science  and  metaphysics  there  is  absolutely  no 
fellowship,  and  thai  if  the  naturalist  does  not  start  out  by 
washing  his  hands  of  metaphysics  he  is  very  soon  reminded 
of  the  necessity  of  such  ablution.  The  metaphysician  may 
not  have  such  strong  feelings  in  the  matter  as  the  natural- 
ist, nevertheless  he  yields  to  the  expediency  of  performing 
some  rite  which  will  purge  him  from  the  suspicion  of  natur- 
alism. The  ritualistic  phase  of  the  relation  may,  however, 
be  accredited  to  the  humors  of  the  situation.  The  serious 
aspect  ai'ises  when  we  consider  that  a  naturalism  that  has 
broken  with  metaphysics,  or,  at  least,  with  all  for  which 
metaphysics  stands,  has  virtually  parted  company  with  its 
spiritual  inheritance.  For,  rightly  or  wrongly  the  meta- 
physical doctrine  of  the  world  has  always  claimed  a  special 
prerogative  in  the  sphere  of  the  ultimate  questions  of  being 
and  destiny,  and  the  metaphysical  interpretation  of  the 
world  has  come  to  be  identified  with  the  spiritual,  so  that 
naturalism  versus  metaphysics  must  inevitably  fall  under 
the  dominion  of  materialistic  conceptions.  On  the  other 
hand  natural  science  holds  the  prerogative  of  fact  with 
which  it  keeps  in  close  and  vital  touch,  and  its  methods 
are,  therefore,  living  methods  of  experience.  Metaphysics 
versus  natural  science  would  thus  find  itself  cut  off  from 
a  corrective  which  it  very  much  needs,  and  like  the  pre- 
Kantian  rationalism,  would  be  doomed  to  find  its  concep- 
tions growing  ever  more  empty  and  its  spirit  more  dog- 
matic Viewed  from  this  point  of  the  compass  the  situation 
takes  on  a  serious  aspect  and  Ave  begin  to  wonder  whether 
we  of  the  twentieth  century,  with  our  much  greater  ampli- 
tude of  resources,  are  about  to  repeat  the  drama  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  a  story  of  the  divorce  of  what  God  and 
nature  have  joined  together  and  its  consequent  bitter  fruit- 
age, the  spectacle  of  an  arid  dogmatism  confronting  a 
purblind  scepticism,  neither  having  any  living  oracle  for 
humanity. 

The  condition  we  have  been  describing  here  is  no  fig- 


GENERAL   INTRODUCTION.  9 

nu'iit  of  imagination.  It  represents  an  actual  situation, 
for  is  it  nut  true  that  it  would  be  difficult  to  find  a  natural- 
i.xi  who  has  any  Faith  in  metaphysics,  or  who  believes  that 
Fruitful  metaphysical  inquiry  is  possible?  On  the  other 
hand,  is  it  not  true  that  our  metaphysical  thinking  is, 
unconsciously  perhaps,  falling  into  the  isolation  of  the 
pre-Kantian  rationalism?  On  taking  up  a  representative 
work  ou  metaphysics,  do  we  not  find,  as  a  rule,  that  its 
author  is  attempting  to  deal  with  his  problems  by  the  dicta 
of  a  reason  which  stands  altogether  aloof  from  the  ordinary 
processes  of  experience?  The  result  is  a  dilemma  between 
whose  horns  we  have  the  choice  as  to  which  one  shall  gore 
us :  that  of  a  natural  science  which  has  become  sceptical  of 
all  knowledge  which  is  not  strictly  measurable  in  terms  of 
space  and  time  and  matter  and  natural  causation,  or,  that 
of  a  metaphysics  which  has  broken  wTith  experience  and 
preaches  a  kind  of  arid  and  dogmatic  omniscience.  Now 
this  unhappy  condition  has  been  brought  about  partly  by 
the  faults  of  metaphysicians  themselves,  but  mainly,  I 
think,  through  the  aggressive  agency  of  modern  science. 
This,  I  take  it,  is  not  greatly  to  the  discredit  of  modern 
science,  for,  with  whatever  other  sins  it  may  be  charged, 
it  is  not  open  to  the  accusation  of  not  knowing  its  own 
mind,  or  of  being  in  any  uncertainty  as  to  its  characteristic 
point  of  view'  and  method.  In  the  first  place  modern 
science  since  Bacon  and  Newton  has  been  frankly  observa- 
tional. It  has  taken  the  point  of  view  of  the  spectator 
who  simply  observes  his  phenomena,  scrupulously  avoiding 
any  presumption  of  community  of  nature  between  himself 
and  his  object,  and  trusting  to  be  able  to  read  the  laws  of 
the  behavior  of  things  from  their  movements.  From  this 
point  of  viewr  the  world  is  largely  material  and  conscious- 
ness is  simply  a  phenomenon  among  phenomena  to  be 
reckoned  with  only  in  view  of  the  part  it  seems  to  play 
objectively  in  connection  with  the  other  forces  of  the  world. 
<  >r,  if  science  essays  to  take  a  closer  view  of  the  affairs  of 
consciousness  it  shrinks  from  introspection  as  leading  to 


10  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

no  definite  results  and  insists  on  citing  conscious  phe- 
nomena before  the  court  of  psycho-physical  parallelism 
where  its  testimony  can  be  given  in  terms  of  the  material 
and  physical.  That  this  fairly  characterizes  the  point  of 
view  of  natural  science  I  think  every  one  will  admit.  The 
order  of  phenomena  with  which  it  deals  is  objective  and 
physical,  and  where  an  order  of  consciousness  obtrudes 
itself  it  is  harnessed  to  the  car  of  a  physical  order  and 
defined  in  terms  of  physical  symbols. 

Neither  is  natural  science  in  any  particular  doubt  as 
to  its  method  of  getting  results.  Whether  it  is  called  on 
to  deal  with  the  movements  of  the  inorganic  or  with  the 
movements  of  organisms,  it  finds  its  categories  in  the 
physical  world  and  proceeds  along  the  lines  of  space  and 
time  and  matter  and  causation.  It  does  not  trouble  itself 
about  design,  or  purpose,  or  thought,  or  will,  but  assumes 
that  all  results  are  traceable  to  mechanical  .antecedents. 
And  if  it  be  called  on  for  its  doctrine  of  causation,  the 
principle  by  which  it  connects  results  with  their  condi- 
tions, it  points  to  Bacon  who  eliminated  form  and  finality 
from  the  principle  of  science  and  reduced  it  to  one  of  pure 
physical  efficiency.  Moreover,  if  you  interrogate  it  as  to 
its  fundamental  concept  of  the  world,  the  notion  which  de- 
termines the  kind  of  a  system  it  conceives  the  world  to  be, 
the  reply  is  again  unhesitating.  The  world  of  observation 
is  a  system  of  phenomena  or  appearances  which  symbolize 
underlying  forces  or  substances.  These  are  unknown.  It 
is  the  business  of  science  to  generalize  these  phenomena  or 
movements,  whatever  they  are  found  to  be,  and  to  canned 
them  as  effects  with  the  causal  forces  which  they  manifest. 
And  it  will  be  from  the  standpoint  of  this  systemic 
category  that  science  will  make  up  its  mind  as  to  both  the 
nature  and  limit  of  knowledge.  To  science  the  staple 
of  knowledge  is  motion,  the  inner  nature  of  things 
is  inaccessible,  and,  regarding  the  deep  things  of  the 
spirit  which  concern  the  hidden  nature,  we  are  obliged  to 
subscribe   to   the   negative   creed   ignoramus,   with   every 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION.  H 

reason  to  believe  that  it  may  be  translated  into  ignordbimus. 
If  now  we  turn  miv  steps  to  the  camp  of  the  meta- 
physicians we  do  not  find  ourselves  in  any  such  bracing 
atmosphere  of  clearness  and  certitude.  The  metaphysi- 
cians differ  among  themselves  on  such  fundamental  ques- 
tions as  that  of  the  nature  and  limits  of  knowledge.  They 
are  not  sure  of  the  locus  of  their  starting-point,  whether  it 
be  in  consciousness  or  in  some  a  priori  datum  of  reason. 
They  are  far  from  decided  as  to  their  method,  whether 
in  this  regard  they  shall  don  the  cast-off  garments  of 
science  and  attempt  to  work  the  world  over  again  under 
scientific  rubrics,  or  make  a  bold  dash  and  construe  every- 
thing  under  the  categories  of  design,  purpose  and  finality. 
In  the  meantime  the  confusion  and  hesitation  is  disconcert- 
ing and  demoralizing,  and  the  immortal  Tinker's  dream  of 
a  byway  to  hell,  even  from  the  gates  of  the  Celestial  City, 
is  in  danger  of  being  realized.  Now  it  is  from  its  own 
weakness  that  metaphysics  needs  most  to  be  delivered. 
And  in  order  that  this  deliverance  may  be  effected  it  must 
be  made  sure,  like  science,  that  it  has  a  real  standpoint, 
a  real  method  and  real  problems  to  solve,  all  of  which  are 
to  be  found  in,  or  arising  out  of,  the  real  experience  of  man 
and  the  exigencies  of  his  effort  to  know  and  realize  the 
world.  AYhere,  then,  we  may  ask,  shall  metaphysics  find 
a  standpoint  of  fruitful  inquiry  not  already  occupied 
by  natural  science?  If  we  once  become  clear  as  to  the 
externality  of  the  attitude  of  science,  one  that  leads  it 
to  stand  aloof  from  the  inner  nature  of  the  things  it  inves- 
tigates, it  will  become  clear  that  there  is  another  possible 
point  of  departure  which  is  to  be  found  within  consciousness 
itself.  As  conscious  beings  we  observe  that  which  is  out- 
side of  us,  but  innerly  we  are  the  subjects  of  a  central 
effort  of  consciousness  and  this  effort  relates  itself  sub- 
jectively to  our  consciousness  of  self,  so  that  it  becomes  an 
effort  of  self,  while  objectively  it  takes  the  form  of  proc- 
ess of  realization.  There  is  an  inner  conscious  effort  by 
which  we  go  out  in  a  process  of  knowing  and  realizing;  this 


12  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

effort,  then,  embodies  our  own  deeper  agency  and  it  is  in 
and  through  it  that  we  are  centrally  related  to  our  world. 
It  is  clear,  then,  that  we  have  here  a  point  of  approach  to 
our  world,  just  as  certainly  given  in  consciousness  as  is  the 
more  external  si  midpoint  of  science,  and  what  we  have  to 
ask  regarding  it  here  is,  why  it  should  not  be  accepted 
as  a  real  bona  fide  basis  for  a  world-interpretation.  Now 
the  prime  condition  of  this  acceptance  is  that  consciousness 
itself  shall  be  regarded  as  real  and  not  as  a  mere  epi- 
phenomenon  of  the  physical.  The  demonstration  of  the 
reality  of  consciousness,  however,  if  practicable  at  all,  is 
very  short.  If  that  to  which  alone  every  other  real  thing 
is  real,  be  itself  unreal,  then  the  apparent  reality  of  all 
other  things  is  illusion.  Therefore,  in  order  that  anj^thing 
may  be  real,  consciousness  must  be  real.  Again,  if  that 
which  is  real  be  real  only  to  consciousness,  then  conscious- 
ness will  not  only  be  real  itself,  but  it  will  supply  the 
standard  of  reality.  So  far  as  I  can  see,  there  is  no  escape 
from  this  conclusion.  It  sums  up  both  logic  and  experience. 
But  the  conclusion  is  far  reaching.  If  consciousness 
be  real,  then  it  is  the  great  reality  and  will  supply  the 
criteria  of  all  reality.  So  far  I  do  not  see  any  room  for 
dissent.  Let  us  then  make  a  deduction  or  two  from  our 
premises.  In  the  first  place  the  reality  of  consciousness 
reifies  (if  we  may  use  the  wTord)  any  standpoint  from 
which  consciousness  makes  a  genuine  effort  to  penetrate  or 
realize  the  world.  Now,  there  are  two  such  standpoints: 
the  one,  that  of  external  observation  and  description,  oc- 
cupied by  natural  science ;  the  other,  that  of  the  internal 
agency  of  consciousness  in  its  central  effort  to  realize  the 
world.  This  standpoint  is  not  occupied  by  natural 
science  and  is  open  to  metaphysics.  The  proposition  here 
is  that  it  shall  be  occupied  bjj  metaphysics  definitely  and 
fin  ally  as  supplying  the  only  cure  for  the  demoraliz- 
ing uncertainty  of  which  we  have  spoken.  Let  the  meta- 
physician make  up  his  mind  once  and  for  all  that  his 
true  standpoint  is  that  of  the  central  agency  of  conscious- 


GENERAL  ENTEODUCTION.  13 

ness  itself  and  he  will  find  himself  again  breathing  the 
bracing  air  of  confidence  and  certitude.  Again,  the  doc- 
trine of  the  reality  of  consciousness  carries  with  it  the 
reality  and  validity  of  the  method  and  categories  of  the 
process  through  which  consciousness  exercises  its  central 
agency.  It  is  only  necessary  to  consider  what  this  deduc- 
tion involves  in  order  to  realize  its  importance.  What  do 
we  mean  by  the  method  and  categories  of  this  inner  proc- 
ess? A  little  reflection  will  supply  us  with  the  answer. 
We  have  represented  this  movement  as  one  of  inner  agency 
because  it  takes  the  form  of  an  effort  on  the  part  of  the 
subject  of  experience.  It  is  not  consciousness  in  any  or  all 
of  its  forms  which  relates  itself  to  this  effort.  It  is  rather 
consciousness  in  a  specific  state  of  reference  which  wTe  call 
selfhood.  It  is  possible  for  consciousness  to  be  related  in 
various  ways,  some  of  them  purely  passive,  to  the  objects 
which  come  within  its  limits,  but  it  is  only  as  a  self  and  as 
a  subject,  therefore,  that  it  can  relate  itself  as  an  agent  in 
a  central  effort  of  realization. 

Now  if  we  ask,  further,  what  this  self -agency  (to  connect 
our  two  terms)  is,  we  answer  that  from  its  very  form  as 
effort  or  agency  it  will  be  primarily  volitional.  Conscious- 
ness first  determines  itself  in  a  motive-form  as  will. 
1"Let  us  say,  then,  that  the  first  determination  of  the 
inner  consciousness  is  that  of  selfhood  in  the  form  of 
will ;  we  then  have  our  internal  point  of  departure  de- 
fined as  will,  and  will  has  been  further  defined  as  our 
internal  effort  to  realize  our  world.  Now,  without  stop- 
ping for  details,  we  immediately  come  to  the  point  of 
asking  two  further  questions :  In  the  first  place,  how  are 
we  to  suppose  the  other  elements  of  consciousness  to  be 
related  to  this  central  effort  of  will?  And  secondly,  how 
are  we  to  define  the  form  of  the  activity  in  which  this  effort 
proceeds  to  realize  its  world?     The  first  question  leads  us 

1  The  following  paragraphs  are  quoted  with  several  verbal  altera- 
tions from  my  Presidential  address  delivered  before  the  American 
Philosophical  Association  in  Washington,  D.  C,  Dec,  1902. 


14  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

into  the  very  heart  of  philosophy;  for  over  against  the 
modern  Schopenhanerian  insight,  which  is  also  the  insight 
of  modern  psychology,  and  which  defines  the  inner  world 
as  will,  we  have  the  more  ancient  insight  of  Plato  that 
defines  the  inner  world  as  idea.  Shall  we  repudiate  the 
older  insight,  and  translate  the  heart  of  things  into  the 
pulsations  of  a  purely  motor  force?  Schopenhauer's 
experiment  in  this  direction  gave  the  real  world  over  to 
blindness  and  unreason;  whereas,  the  perennial  complaint 
against  Platonism  is  that  its  steps  are  too  much  in  the 
clouds,  and  that  it  divorces  its  ideas  too  much  from  the 
world  of  ordinary  experience  and  human  interests ;  that  its 
habit  is  to  deny  the  reality  of  this  ordinary  world  and  lose 
itself  in  dreams  and  unreal  abstractions.  Without  stop- 
ping, however,  to  debate  the  issue  between  Platonism  and 
the  modern  doctrine  of  will,  I  propose  here  to  claim  for 
metaphysics  the  right  to  avoid  partisanship  by  seeking  a 
synthesis  that  will  be  just  to  both  the  ancient  and  modern 
insights.1  While  it  is  no  doubt  true  that  idea  without  will 
is  powerless,  and  that  will  without  idea  is  blind,  yet  if  we 
include  the  two  terms  in  a  real  synthesis  we  thus  arrive  at 
the  notion  of  the  idea  as  informed  with  motor  energy;  or, 
approaching  it  from  the  opposite  pole,  Ave  arrive  at  the 
notion  of  will  or  motor  energy  as  informed  with  ideal 
insight.1  Let  us,  then,  apply  to  this  ideo-dynamic  conception 
the  name  reason;  we  shall  have  in  reason,  which  from  one 
point  of  view  is  will,  while  from  another  it  is  idea,  the 
central  pulse  of  the  inner  being  of  the  world. 

"If  this  conception  of  reason  and  the  relation  to  it  of 
will  be  admitted,  then  I  for  one  am  ready  to  fall  in  with 
the  emphasis  which  modern  philosophy  has  placed  on  will, 
since,  on  the  one  hand,  it  indicates  a  healthy  reaction 
against  the  one-sided  intellectualism  of  ancient  idealism, 
while  on  the  other,  its  relation  to  reason  preserves  it  from 

1  We   reach  a   conception  here   analogous  to  the   "idee  forces"  of 
Fouillee. 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION.  15 

blindness  and  translates  it  into  a  principle  of  intelligent 
prevision  rather  than  one  of  caprice. 

"This  leads  to  the  second  question,  namely:  How  are  we 
to  define  the  form  of  activity  in  wThich  this  function  we 
call  reason  or  will  relates  itself  to  the  world?  Are  we  to 
regard  it  as  primarily  non-selective  and  mechanical,  so 
that  without  ado  it  can  be  translated  into  terms  of  matter 
and  motion  acting'  under  forms  of  space  and  time?  Or, 
shall  Ave  regard  it  as  teleological,  as  motived  by  intention 
and  as  determined  in  its  direction  by  some  definitely  rep- 
resentable  end?  On  this  question,  while  I  feel  sure  that 
\ve  cannot  choose  the  mechanical  alternative,  yet  I  confess 
to  a  measure  of  recoil  from  the  easy  teleology  that  some- 
times passes  for  profound  philosophy.  The  movement  of 
will  must,  I  think,  as  a  whole,  be  regarded  as  selective,  but 
there  is  a  first  stage  of  what  we  may  call  spontaneity  in 
will-effort,  that  is  not  clearly  teleological.  This  sponta- 
neity is  selective,  it  is  true,  but  the  'select'— if  the  term  be 
allowed— is  come  upon,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  without  prior 
intention,  just  as  the  young  chick  first  comes  upon  food 
that  is  palatable.  The  select iveness  in  this  case,  as  in  all 
cases  of  spontaneity,  is  due  to  some  original  property  of 
the  consciousness  that  puts  forth  the  effort.  (In  the 
chick's  case,  the  selectiveness  is  to  be  found  in  an  original 
sensitive  property  of  its  palate.)  But,  after  the  first  step, 
the  movement  tends  to  become  selective  in  the  ordinary 
ideological  sense;  or,  to  state  the  case  in  terms  that  will 
further  our  philosophical  aim,  will-effort  after  the  first 
stage,  in  which  it  is  subjectively  selective,  tends  to  become 
objectively  selective  and  teleological.  And  it  tends  to  be- 
come so  because  of  the  implicit  rationality  from  which  will 
is  inseparable  in  its  foundations. 

"We  have  contended  that  the  notion  of  reason  involves 
a  synthesis  of  idea  and  will,  and  this  enables  us  here  to 
translate  spontaneous  selectiveness  into  terms  of  primary 
conscious  quality,  while,  in  regard  to  the  later  stages  of  the 
will-activity,  it  is  clear  that  it  has  become  informed  with 


16  CONCEPTS  OF  PHILOSOPHY. 

the  idea  in  a  definitely  directive  form,  and  is  end-seeking, 
therefore,  in  the  full  objective  sense.  To  this  whole 
activity,  in  view  of  its  subjective  and  spontaneous  aspect, 
as  Avell  as  in  its  more  objective  and  teleological  phase,  we 
may  well  apply  the  term  'purposive,'  understanding,  of 
course,  that  this  term  is  used  broadly  so  as  to  include  the 
sphere  of  spontaneous  selectiveness  along  with  that  which 
is  more  deliberate.  It  thus  becomes  possible  to  define  the 
method  of  metaphysics  in  terms  of  the  fundamental  con- 
cepts that  determine  the  character  of  its  procedure.  And 
we  can  say,  in  view  of  conclusions  already  reached,  that, 
whereas  a  mechanical  method  like  that  of  natural  science 
may  be  denned  as  one  that  generalizes  its  phenomena  under 
the  forms  of  space,  time,  matter,  or  cause,  and  reduces  them 
to  statements  called  laws  which  do  not  directly  imply  either 
reason  or  purpose  in  the  world;  the  method  which  we  call 
metaphysical,  on  the  contrary,  taking  its  departure  from 
the  heart  of  consciousness  itself  and  seeking  to  construe 
things  in  the  light  of  the  central  effort  of  consciousness, 
attains  as  its  final  result  an  interpretation  of  the  world 
that  reduces  it  directly  to  terms  of  reason  and  purpose." 

We  thus  reach  the  conception  of  the  two  methods  and 
points  of  view  from  which  consciousness  may  proceed  in  its 
effort  to  realize  its  world.  The  one  which  science  pursues 
is  more  external  and  descriptive ;  it  excludes  purpose  and 
finality  and  adheres  to  the  Baconian  principle  and  cate- 
gories of  natural  causation.  The  other,  which  we  have 
here  attempted  to  vindicate  and  define  for  metaphysical 
use,  is  more  internal  and,  as  Koyce  would  say,  more  appre- 
ciative, and  founds  directly  on  design  and  purpose,  commit- 
ting its  fortunes  to  the  teleological  categories  of  finality. 

To  return,  then,  to  the  point  from  which  this  long  dis- 
cussion set  out,  we  proposed  to  show  how  the  synthetic 
task  of  philosophy  arises  out  of  a  real  situation,  and  is, 
therefore,  vital  and  pressing.  We  regard  the  demonstra- 
tion of  this  as  now  complete,  and  what  it  proves  is  more 
than  a  transient  need.     The  whole  requirement  of  knowl- 


GENERAL  INTRODUCTION.  17 

edge  is  one  that  neither  method  can  fully  meet.  Natural 
science,  acting  under  definite  categories,  can  fill  certain 
measures  of  truth.  But  others  equally  vital  are  left  empty. 
Metaphysics,  following  another  set  of  categories,  fills  other 
measures  and  its  results  cannot  be  dispensed  with.  But 
the  attempt  of  either  discipline  to  ignore  the  other,  or  to 
proceed  without  regard  to  its  results,  is  foredoomed  to 
failure  and  ultimately  to  the  sceptical  eclipse  of  knowledge. 
Philosophy  must  perform  its  mediating  office  by  supplying 
a  synthesis  which  will  organize  the  results  of  both  natural 
science  and  metaphysics.  And  in  order  to  be  genuinely  syn- 
thetic in  its  vision  as  well  as  in  its  aim,  it  must  have  passed 
through  the  Copernican  revolution  and  come  to  the  realiza- 
tion of  the  fact  that  consciousness  itself  is  the  great  reality, 
that  it  constitutes  the  orders  of  both  science  and  meta- 
physics, and  that  the  unity  of  truth  to  which  both  aspire 
will  be  attained  through  the  application  of  its  own  highest 
principle.  Through  its  synthetic  vision,  philosophy  thus, 
becomes  a  discipline  of  the  whole,  and  it  is  this  vision  which 
guides  it  through  the  mazes  of  difference  and  plurality  to 
which  it  is  not  blind  or  irresponsive,  to  its  own  proper 
goal,  the  unity  of  truth. 

Moreover,  it  lies  well  within  the  main  purpose  of  the 
discussions  which  follow  to  show  that  the  synthesis  of  phil- 
osophy only  completes  itself  when  it  has  vindicated  and 
included  in  its  scheme  of  certitude  those  judgments  of 
belief  which  spring  out  of  fundamental  moral  and  religious 
grounds.  Neither  science  nor  philosophy  will  be  in  a 
healthy  state  so  long  as  those  beliefs  which  embody  the 
deeper  convictions  of  humanity  are  left  outside  of  the  pale 
of  knowledge,  a  prey  to  scepticism.  That  theoretic  certi- 
tude must  be  complemented  by  faith,  and  that  man  has  a 
chartered  right  to  certainty  as  to  God  and  his  own  free- 
dom and  immortality,  is  a  proposition  the  justification  of 
which  is  an  important  part  of  the  main  business  of  phil- 
osophy. The  following  discussions  will  make  clear,  we 
think,  that   when  reason   asserts  its   full  prerogative,  not 


18  CONCEPTS  OP  PHILOSOPHY. 

only  as  a  theoretic  faculty,  but  also  as  will,  it  is  able 
to  emancipate  man  from  the  scepticisms  of  partisan  think- 
ing and  direct  him  in  the  path  of  the  realization  of  the 
highest  ideals  of  his  nature. 


PART  I 

ANALYSIS 


CHAPTER  I. 

CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWER. 

Max  is  related  to  the  world  and  to  himself  through  con- 
sciousness. It  is  only  as  he  becomes  conscious  of  them  that 
thing's  exist  for  him  upon  which  he  can  react  and  construct 
his  system  of  reality.  This  will  remain  true  whether  we 
hold  with  Hume  that  the  originals  of  all  our  conscious 
activities  are  sensations,  or,  with  Kant,  supplement  these 
with  certain  ideas  of  pure  reason.  Whether  we  be  idealists 
or  realists,  empiricists  or  rationalists,  sensationalists  or 
transcendentalists,  there  will  be  but  the  one  road  for  each 
of  us  to  the  apprehension  of  things,  and  that  will  be  the 
way  of  conscious  effort.  Let  us  stop,  then,  and  consider  this 
thing  we  call  conscious  effort.  What  is  it  to  be  conscious? 
How  shall  we  define  consciousness?  It  is  indefinable.  We 
may  describe  consciousness  and  tell  what  it  does,  and  how  it 
acts,  but  in  order  to  say  what  it  is  we  must  have  terms 
simpler  and  more  ultimate  than  itself.  And  this  is  impos- 
sible from  the  very  fact  that  it  is  only  in  consciousness 
that  anything  is  realized  at  all.  Let  us  concede,  then,  that 
in  consciousness  we  have  something  which  is  ultimate  and 
indefinable.  Shall  we  conclude  from  this  that  consciousness 
is  unknowable?  This  would  follow  if  we  could  say,  first, 
that  consciousness  is  indefinable  and,  secondly,  that  it  is  not 
ourselves,  but  something  which  is  alien  to  us.  But  we  cannot 
go  so  far,  for  while  consciousness  may  defy  definition  and 
even  description,  it  is  yet  of  the  substance  of  ourselves,  and 

21 


22  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

we  who  know,  know  by  virtue  of  being  identical  with  a 
portion  of  the  consciousness  that  knows.  Instead,  then,  of 
being  shut  up  to  the  conclusion  that  consciousness  being 
indefinable  is  unknowable,  there  is  another  alternative,  and 
it  is  open  to  us  to  say  that  while  consciousness  may  not  be 
able  to  define  itself  as  object,  it  knows  itself  as  subject,  by 
a  self-knowledge  which  is  immediate  and  exclusive  of  the 
mediation  of  objective  categories. 

There  is,  then,  a  form  of  knowledge  which  we  call  self- 
knowledge  and  this  knowledge  is  immediate.  It  is  that 
form  of  knowledge  in  which  being  becomes  aware  of  itself 
in  its  effort  to  know  the  world.  We  call  the  knowledge  which 
is  arrived  at  through  the  agency  of  descriptive  or  defining 
terms,  mediate,  while  to  the  awareness  of  self  we  apply  the 
term  immediate  because  it  involves  no  such  act  of  media- 
tion. What  we  say  here  may  be  put  in  different  words. 
When  we  describe  or  define  we  use  terms  already  known, 
to  characterize  what  is  unknown  or  less  known.  Describ- 
ing or  defining  thus  depends  on  the  existence  in  conscious- 
ness of  fields  of  experience  which  are  already  better  known 
than  the  field  we  are  seeking  to  determine.  And  the 
process  which  we  have  called  mediate  consists  in  employing 
the  forms  of  the  better  known,  to  define  or  describe  the 
matter  of  the  less  known.  There  is,  therefore,  a  vicarious, 
substitutionary  aspect  to  all  such  knowledge.  But  accom- 
panying and  underlying  this  process  is  the  one  we  have 
called  immediate,  that  awareness  of  self  by  virtue  of  which 
consciousness  possesses  itself  of  the  fact  of  its  own  identity 
with  the  subject  of  the  knowing  activity.  To  say  that 
consciousness  may  know  anything,  and  yet  be  in  this  funda- 
mental sense  unknown  to  itself  is  to  utter  nonsense  that  is 
excusable  only  on  the  ground  that  the  distinction  between 
mediate  and  immediate  apprehension  has  been  overlooked. 
Conscious  activity  always  involves  a  synthesis  of  the  two 
moments,  self -awareness  and  the  definition  of  objective 
content,  and  the  attempt  to  separate  them  reduces  the 
business  of  knowing  to  an  abstraction. 


chap.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEE.  23 

Another  heresy  must  be  refuted  here.  It  is  possible  to 
distinguish  the  cognitive,  knowing  activity,  from  other 
forms  of  conscious  realization,  but  it  is  not  possible  to 
separate  them  so  that  they  shall  be  in  fact  distinct.  There 
is  no  original  impulse  to  know  in  consciousness,  but  the 
conscious  agent  is  at  first  impelled  to  acts  of  realization 
with  a  view  to  the  satisfaction  of  its  wants  and  desires. 
Originally,  consciousness  is  the  organ  of  certain  primary 
reactions  which  we  call  feelings,  emotions,  desires,  and 
these  stimulate  the  motor-consciousness  to  those  acts  of  will 
which  lead  to  their  satisfaction.  This  cmoto -volitional 
activity  supplies  the  form  in  which  consciousness  first 
seeks  to  realize  the  world.  It  would  be  a  prime  heresy  for 
us  to  suppose,  however,  that  any  process  of  conscious 
realization  can  be  wholly  lacking  in  cognitive  elements. 
In  fact,  while  it  is  true,  as  we  have  said,  that  the  cognitive 
is  not  an  original  impulse  of  consciousness,  it  is  certainly 
an  original  potence  which  the  machinery  of  feeling  and 
will  immediately  stimulate  into  activity.  Blind  feeling  or 
will  could  take  but  a  single  step  without  the  guidance  of 
cognition.  The  very  first  movement  of  consciousness  in 
any  direction  will  develop  a  fragment  of  representation,  a 
ray  of  insight,  which  will  guide  the  following  movement. 
And  this  cognitive  guidance  will  present,  in  germ  at  least, 
the  two  aspects  alluded  to  above;  consciousness  will  have 
developed  a  fragment  of  objective  definition  and  it  will 
have  caught  some  little  glint  of  awareness  of  itself.  In 
short  it  will  have  made  a  start  in  that  effort  to  realize  Hie 
things  of  the  world  and  itself,  which  we  call  knowledge ; 
or,  more  broadly,  experience. 

The  effort  to  know  is  not,  then,  an  absolutely  primal 
impulse  of  consciousness  toward  self-satisfaction  in  its 
world.  But  though  secondary  in  its  rise  it  is  yet  primary 
and  underivative  in  its  character.  The  knowledge-activity 
is  sui  <)<  ii<  ris  and  may  not  be  resolved  into  terms  of  feeling 
or  volition.  Albeit,  it  is  inseparably  bound  up  will)  these 
and  without  them  would  be  a  bloodless  abstraction.     Vet  we 


24  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

must  not  cany  the  notion  of  dependence  so  far  as  to  convey 
the  implication  of  any  kind  or  degree  of  inferiority.  Cog- 
nition, once  aroused,  stands  in  its  own  right.  It  is  true 
that  in  relation  to  the  emoto- volitional  activity  it  is  the  eye 
which  guides  the  process  and  does  not  supply  the  original 
motives.  From  this  a  plea  might  be  drawn  for  the  absolute 
subordination  of  knowledge  to  practice.  But  there  is  an- 
other side,  which  has  been  hidden  from  many  of  the  wise  and 
prudent,  and  only  becomes  clear  when  we  get  possession  of 
the  fact  that  from  another  point  of  view  the  whole  emoto- 
volitional  process  is  a  caterer  to  knowledge.  The  truth  is, 
the  whole  of  a  man's  battle  with  the  world  in  order  to  draw 
from  it  the  means  of  satisfying  his  wants  is  also  a  process 
of  realization  by  means  of  which  he  penetrates  into  and 
knows  the  world,  including  himself.  The  relation  of  the  life 
struggle  to  the  struggle  for  knowledge  is  neither  one  of  ex- 
clusion nor  subordination,  but  one  rather  of  inclusion;  for 
just  as  truly  as  cognition  contributes  to  the  life  struggle,  so 
is  the  life  struggle  itself  tributary  to  knowledge.  When, 
therefore,  we  deal  with  the  activity  of  knowledge  and  the 
effort  of  man's  intelligence  to  penetrate  and  realize  the 
world,  we  are  not  concerning  ourselves  with  a  fragment  of 
his  consciousness  or  with  a  fragmentary  activity,  but 
rather  with  the  whole  activity  of  his  consciousness  directed 
as  a  whole  to  the  realization  of  a  specific  end. 

When  consciousness  becomes  the  organ  of  knowledge  it 
gradually  grows  awTare  of  two  points  of  view  from  which 
it  is  possible  for  it  to  seek  an  acquaintance  with  its  world. 
We  shall  call  these  points  of  view  the  external  and  the 
hi!<  rnal.  These  may  be  distinguished  in  various  ways. 
The  external  may  be  represented  as  objective,  the  internal 
as  subjective,  and  there  is  a  sense  in  which  this  distinction 
will  be  helpful.  Again,  it  may  be  said  with  truth  that 
the  external  is  the  standpoint  of  observation  and  descrip- 
tion, while  the  internal  is  that  of  appreciation.  Let  us 
attempt  to  define  these  points  of  view  in  respect  of  the 
attitude  which  the  knowing  subject  is  led  to  take  toward 


chap.  i.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWER.  25 

consciousness  itself,  according  as  he  occupies  one  or  the 
other.  From  what,  we  call  the  external  point  of  view, 
consciousness  will  be  treated  as  simply  a  factor  in  a  world 
which  possesses  other  factors.  In  relation  to  these  other  fac- 
tors, consciousness  will  have  no  advantage,  if,  indeed,  it  be 
not  assigned  a  subordinate  place.  The  standpoint  of  the 
knower  will  be  outside  of  the  matter  observed.  There  will 
be  no  presumption  of  any  community  of  nature  between 
knower  and  object.  But  the  phenomena  even  of  conscious- 
ness itself  will  be  observed,  generalized  and  defined,  just 
as  are  the  phenomena  of  any  extra-conscious  physical 
agent.  From  the  external  point  of  view,  the  only  way  of 
knowing  is  through  observing  and  describing  the  move- 
ments, the  behavior  of  things,  and  there  can  be  no  question 
of  knowing  the  inner  nature  of  things.  This  type  of  knowl- 
edge can  only  formulate  outer  movements  of  things  and 
may  never  find  itself  in  a  position  where  it  can  say  that  its 
formulations  give  any  real  insight  into  their  nature. 
To  say  this,  however,  is  not  to  condemn  knowledge  of  this 
type.  It  is,  rather,  to  define  the  type  and  bring  out  its 
strength  as  well  as  its  weakness.  The  strength  of  this  type 
consists  in  the  fact  that  its  terms  are  facts  which  are  observ- 
able, and  therefore  describable.  Its  generalizations  are 
open  to  tests  which  are  definite,  and  its  results  may  be 
clearly  and  accurately  defined.  Now,  if  we  conceive  con- 
sciousness as  becoming  the  subject  of  this  external  func- 
tion, this  particular  way  of  looking  at  the  world  in  which 
things  become  things  in  themselves,  with  a  nature  that  is 
hidden  from  view,  and,  for  aught  the  observer  knows  to  the 
contrary,  altogether  alien  to  his  own  nature;  we  shall  have 
conceived  the  ordinary  standpoint  of  science.  For  con- 
sciousness as  an  organ  of  scientific  observation  and  reflec- 
lion  stands  outside  of  the  world  of  science  which  it  con- 
templates  as  a  system  of  things  in  themselves  which  do  not 
reveal  their  inner  nature  in  their  manifestations,  or  supply 
any  analogies  to  the  investigating  consciousness  by  virtue  of 
which  this  inner  nature  may  be  indirectly  approached.  As  an 


26  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

external  observer  of  the  world,  consciousness  finds  as  its 
sole  available  data  the  outer  movements  or  behavior  in 
space  and  time,  of  the  tilings  which  in  themselves  lie  hidden 
from  view.  This  behavior  presents  itself  in  the  first  in- 
stance as  an  unorganized  multitude,  a  chaotic  and  unre- 
lated heap  of  happenings  and  movements.  Hume's 
sensorinm,  in  which  the  sense-atoms  appear  without  any 
real  connections,  will  serve  as  a  good  analogy  for  the  world 
of  phenomena  as  science  finds  it.  Of  course  science  ap- 
proaches a  -world  which  has  already  been  organized  in  a 
crude  way  by  common  sense.  But  the  first  step  of  science 
consists  in  setting  aside,  provisionally  at  least,  this  order 
of  common  sense  and  attempting  the  work  of  construction 
de  novo.  Science  then  sets  out  from  a  world  of  discon- 
nected, and  therefore  meaningless,  happenings,  and  its  aim 
is  to  seek  in  this  mutacious  sea  of  particulars  for  points  of 
uniformity  and  points  of  stability.  In  a  world  of  plurality 
and  change,  only  the  uniform  and  stable  will  be  able  to 
satisfy  the  concept  of  order  for  which  science  is  looking. 

We  may  ask,  then,  how  science  proceeds  to  realize  its  aim. 
By  seizing  on  those  existential-points  in  the  sea  of  change 
which  recur  again  and  again.  The  first  form  of  identity, 
and  in  fact  the  first  form  of  order,  in  science,  is  simple 
recurrence;  the  fact  that  some  phenomena  repeat  them- 
selves. And  these  repetitions  breed  in  consciousness  the 
expectation  of  recurrence,  and  this  expectation  finds  an 
answering  response  in  a  tendency  to  regularity  in  the 
objective  world.  Hidden  as  are  the  natures  of  things,  they 
yet  show  a  disposition  to  behave  themselves  in  an  orderly 
way.  These  points  of  recurrence  are  seized  upon  by 
science,  and,  by  means  of  its  abstracting  and  generalizing 
activities,  translated  into  propositions  which  are  taken  as 
true,  not  for  any  single  point  in  the  phenomenal  world, 
but  for  the  mass  of  phenomena  as  a  whole.  For,  abstrac- 
tion and  generalization  proceed  on  the  sublime  assurance 
that  the  recurrent  fact,  say,  of  heat  expanding  substances, 
which  characterizes  this  little  eddy  of  phenomena  to  which 


chap.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEE.  27 

the  range  of  our  observation  has  been  limited,  is  a  sufficient 
guarantee  for  the  sweeping  proposition  which  throws  off  all 
limits  and  affirms  that  anywhere  in  the  broad  ocean  of 
happening's  it  will  be  found  to  be  true  that  heat  will 
expand  substances.  But  science  discovers  at  a  very  early 
stage  in  its  progress  that  a  presumption  with  which  it 
stalled  out;  namely,  that  of  the  equal  value  for  knowledge 
of  all  the  elements  of  experience,  must  be  given  up,  or  at 
least  very  seriously  modified.  The  Humian  essays  to  carry 
this  presumption  through,  but  finds  that  his  terms  will 
persist  in  asserting  for  themselves  different  empirical 
values.  For  example,  the  problem  of  the  outer  movements 
of  things  is  not  simply  one  of  recurrence,  but  it  is  found 
that  outer  movements  in  Avhatever  order  and  how  fre- 
quently soever  they  may  recur,  all  come  bearing  one  com- 
mon character;  they  are  phenomena  in  space.  And  it  is 
found  that  while  in  all  other  respects  these  phenomena 
never  escape  wholly  from  the  taint  of  particularity  and 
that  the  propositions  founded  on  them  must  forever  remain 
open  to  revision,  yet  here  in  space  we  have  come  upon  a 
phenomenon  which  will  bear  out  propositions  that  are 
absolutely  sure-sighted  and  universal.  Space  may  be  re- 
garded, then,  as  something  unique,  not  as  a  thing  in  itself 
necessarily,  but  as  a  point  of  absolute  uniformity  in  the  sea 
of  objective  phenomena. 

Again,  if  we  translate  our  phenomena  into  terms  of 
events  it  will  be  found  that  these  do  not  in  all  respects 
maintain  equal  values.  For,  while  the  prediction  of  events 
which  rests  on  the  uniformity  of  recurrence  will  always  be 
affected  with  contingency — if  we  may  use  a  term  which 
simply  means  liable  to  disappoint  expectations— yet  there 
is  one  aspect  of  the  world  of  events  which  rises  above  con- 
tingency, just  as  space  rises  above  it  in  the  sphere  of  outer 
movements.  That  aspect  is  what  we  call  the  order  of 
events  regarded  as  an  order  of  changes.  The  notion  of 
change  is  that  of  transition  from  one  state  to  another,  and 
this  transition   gives   rise   tc   what   we   call   a   series,   the 


28  ANALYSIS.  tart  i. 

terms  of  which  may  or  may  not  be  recurrent.  Taking  the 
series  of  changes  as  thus  indifferent  to  the  character  of  any 
particular  member  of  the  series,  we  call  the  form  of  this 
series,  that  is,  the  form  of  change  as  such,  time;  and  it  is 
found  that  while  all  other  propositions  founded  on  change 
are  contingent,  yet,  in  the  single  instance  of  time,  we  have 
a  phenomenon  on  which  universal  and  non-contingent 
propositions  may  be  founded.  We  say  in  view  of  this  as- 
pect of  events,  that  however  fragmentary  and  broken  their 
recurrence  may  be,  yet  events  shall  appear  in  the  dress  of 
time.  This  is  something  that  may  be  predicted  with  abso- 
lute assurance. 

Now,  if  we  seek  the  net  outcome  of  our  investigation  so 
far,  we  shall  find  it,  I  think,  in  three  leading  conceptions. 
Taking  the  phenomenal  world  as  science  finds  it  at  the 
beginning  of  its  enterprise,  what  it  represents  is  a  plurality 
of  unanalyzed  existential  points,  which  in  ordinary  experi- 
ence we  have  learned  to  regard  as  things  or  objects.  The 
obtrusive  quality  which  characterizes  these  as  a  whole  is 
their  plurality.  It  is  a  world  of  maniness;  a  countable 
world,  but  not  yet.  Science  must  achieve  its  notions  of 
space  and  time ;  space  as  the  uncontingent  form  of  outer 
movement,  with  its  dimensional  continuity ;  and  time,  as 
the  uncontingent  form  of  serial  change,  with  its  non- 
dimensional  discreteness.  It  will  then  be  in  a  position 
to  develop  from  its  categories  of  plurality,  space  and 
time,  the  concept  of  number  and  the  method  of  dealing 
with  the  phenomenal  world  to  which  we  apply  the  name 
mathematical,  a  method  which,  abstracting  from  quality, 
and  thereby  also,  from  contingency,  aims  to  define  its  world 
in  the  strictly  determinate  and  exact  terms  of  quantity. 

But  the  mathematical  aim,  howsoever  completely  it 
may  be  realized,  will  fail  to  satisfy  two  very  profound 
instincts  of  the  scientific  consciousness.  The  first  of  these 
is  an  instinct  for  the  grounding  of  uniformities,  and  the 
second  is  an  instinct  for  the  stability  of  the  world.  The 
first  expresses  itself  in  the  demand  for  causes;  that  is,  for 


chap.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEK.  29 

those  dynamic  antecedents  of  things  or  events  which,  when 
supplied,  will  answer  the  question,  how  or  why  these  events 
came  to  occupy  the  place  they  hold  in  the  order  of  the 
world's  phenomena.  True,  it  is  said  that  the  tendency  of 
modern  physics  is  away  from  the  notion  of  causation  which 
implies  capacity  in  one  thing  to  affect  another,  toward  a  no- 
tion of  relational  equivalence  which  can  be  determined  with 
greater  mathematical  precision.  But  however  the  notion 
may  be  defecated  of  quality,  there  will  always  survive  as 
the  indefectible  minimum  of  the  notion  of  causality,  the 
presumption  that  when  the  real  causes  of  any  phenomenon 
have  been  ascertained  the  rationale  of  the  position  which 
that  phenomenon  holds  in  the  world-order  has  also  been  de- 
termined in  a  manner  that  satisfies  the  instinct  of  the  scien- 
tific consciousness.  Now,  the  notion  of  cause,  like  those  of 
space  and  time,  when  once  achieved  enables  science,  in  the 
wide  field  of  its  application,  to  escape  the  clutches  of  con- 
tingency in  propositions  which  express  what  is  universal  and 
necessary.  Hume  thought  he  had  destroyed  the  rational 
necessity  of  cause  when  he  had  reduced  it  to  a  mere  uni- 
form time  relation;  having  first  attempted  to  empty  time 
itself  of  the  non-contingent.  But  we  have  found  that  the 
notion  of  cause  which  can  alone  satisfy  science,  is  one  that 
conceives  it  as  the  universal  symbol  of  dynamic  relation.  In 
a  world  made  up  of  a  plurality  of  things  or  existential 
points,  if  these  are  to  be  conceived  as  capable  of  any  sort 
of  mutual  influence,  the  principle  of  conditionality  or 
dynamic  dependence  must  pervade  the  whole.  To  this 
principle  when  abstracted  from  all  other  qualities,  the  name 
cause  is  given.  Causality  then  becomes  a  universal  and 
non-contingent  aspect  of  the  world. 

It  would  perhaps  create  a  scandal  were  we  to  say  that 
some  notion  of  substance  is  essential  to  science.  But  this 
is  true.  We  are  not  speaking  here  of  that  presumption 
of  things  in  themselves  on  which  science  rests.  We  refer 
rather  to  its  demand  for  the  stability  of  its  elements. 
How  does  this  express  itself  ?     The  idea  of  substance,  when 


30  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

boiled  down,  is  that  of  persistent  points  in  our  world  for 
the  repetition  of  happenings  or  for  the  reinstatement  of 
experiences.  Whatever  the  substance  of  that  tree  out  in 
the  campus  may  be  in  itself,  it  represents  to  me  a  persistent 
point  in  reality  where  I  may  be  assured  of  a  repetition  and 
reinstatement  of  a  certain  kind  of  experience.  To  this 
experience  as  a  whole  I  apply  the  name  tree  and  the  sub- 
stance of  the  tree  is  thai  in  reality,  by  virtue  of  which  the 
possibility  of  this  reinstatement  remains  a  persistent  fact. 
Now  the  scientific  consciousness  makes  just  this  identical 
demand  on  the  world.  The  notion  of  cause  determines 
only  the  rationale  of  position  but  does  not  ground  persist- 
ence. This  can  be  grounded  only  in  conditions  which  are 
stable,  a  requirement  that  is  only  partly,  not  fully,  met  by 
Mill 's  permanent  causes.  For  science  wants  to  be  assured  of 
permanence  itself,  and  it  will  not  feel  secure  regarding  the 
stability  of  the  world  until  it  has  achieved  a  notion  which 
will  enable  it  to  incorporate  permanence  into  the  very  con- 
stitution of  phenomena.  This  is  achieved  in  its  notion  of 
matter.  For  however  much  modern  science  may  be  dis- 
posed to  do  despite  to  matter,  it  cannot  get  on  without  it. 
And  just  as  we  saw  in  the  instance  of  causation,  that  there 
is  a  concept  of  cause  which  is  fundamental  to  science, 
so  here,  if  we  concede  that  motion  is  not  an  ultimate 
concept,  but  has  a  necessary  presupposition,  then  mat- 
ter comes  in  as  that  presupposition.  We  may  translate 
the  notion  of  matter  from  that  of  the  traditional  atom 
into  that  of  force;  or  we  may  resolve  it  into  some  spring 
of  electrical  disturbance;  there  still  remains  the  pre- 
sumption that  some  stable  element  is  needed  to  supply 
a  basis  and  medium  for  the  movements  and  changes  of  the 
world.  Let  us  apply  the  name  matter  to  this  necessary 
substratum ;  or,  risking  a  scandal,  let  us  call  it  substance. 
The  scientific  consciousness,  then,  has  need  of  substance  to 
guarantee  the  stability  of  its  world-order.  Without  its 
category  of  substance,  it  would  have  no  adequate  rationale 
for  the  fact  that  the  world  persists  and  that  the  drama  of 


CHAP.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEK.  31 

its  movements  and  changes  is  played  in  a  stable  medium 
which  guarantees  its  uniformity  and  order. 

Let  us  go  back  now  and  fix  our  bearings.  We  have 
pointed  out  that  one  of  the  modes  by  which  consciousness 
seeks  to  know  the  world  is  that  of  external  observation; 
that  from  this  point  of  view  the  world  is  an  object  whose 
inner  nature  is  hidden  from  the  observer,  and  that  the 
whole  function  of  the  investigation  is  to  spell  out  the  laws 
of  things  from  their  ascertainable  movements.  In  our 
effort  to  describe  the  operation  of  this  method  we  have  seen 
how  the  purely  empirical  activity  of  abstraction  and  gen- 
eralization of  phenomena  has  become  qualified  and  trans- 
formed by  the  rise  in  connection  with  the  phenomenal 
world  as  a  whole,  of  certain  universal  aspects  or  categories, 
which  supply  the  basis  of  non-contingent  and  universal 
judgments  in  which  the  rationale  of  the  whole  field  of 
phenomena  is  expressed.  Following  this  trail  we  have  seen 
how  the  rational  demand  of  science  has  been  successively 
met  and  satisfied  by  the  categories  of  space,  time,  cause 
and  substance :  the  latter,  as  will  be  made  clear  later,  sup- 
plying the  rational  point  of  transition  from  the  interpre- 
tation of  science  to  one  that  is  founded  on  an  insight  which 
is  metaphysical. 

We  moderns  are  in  danger  of  forgetting  that  there  is 
another  point  of  view  from  which  an  effort  to  realize  the 
world  may  be  put  forth  by  a  conscious  being.  This  danger 
has  arisen  from  the  attempt  we  have  been  making  from  the 
very  outset  of  our  modern  thinking  to  abstract  the  knowl- 
edge-process too  absolutely  from  other  forms  of  conscious 
activity.  Bacon  is  to  blame,  perhaps,  for  part  of  this 
result,  though  most  of  the  mischief  has  arisen,  no  doubt, 
from  a  too  literal  interpretation  of  his  precepts.  If  we 
name  the  point  of  view  we  have  just  developed,  that  of 
natural  science,  it  is  certain  that  Bacon  did  not  regard 
natural  science  as  completely  exhaustive  of  the  whole 
field  of  knowledge.  It  is  certain  that  in  distributing  the 
search  for  causes  in  the  spirit  of  Aristotle,  he  allotted  to 


32  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

natural  science  the  material  and  efficient  which  together 
might  stand  for  the  physical  conditions  of  a  thing,  while 
reserving  for  a  discipline,  to  which  he  applied  the  tradi- 
tional title  metaphysics,  the  formal  and  final,  which,  taken 
together,  might  be  termed  the  principle  of  the  non-material 
or  spiritual  explanation  of  things.  Bacon  regarded  meta- 
physics, which  deals  with  the  formal  and  final  causes  of  the 
world,  as  the  queen  of  the  sciences,  thus  including  it  in  his 
scheme  of  knowledge.  It  is  not  the  purpose  here  to  argue, 
however,  but  to  define  as  clearly  as  possible  the  point  of 
view  to  which  we  have  already  applied  the  name  internal. 
We  have  also  called  it  the  metaphysical  and  have  thereby 
ruined  it,  possibly,  in  the  opinion  of  a  great  many  people. 
But  let  us  seek  to  define  it  without  prejudice.  It  is  possible 
for  a  conscious  being,  pursuant  of  his  purpose  to  know  the 
world,  either  to  approach  that  world  after  the  manner  of 
natural  science  as  we  have  described;  or,  by  taking  a  more 
internal  standpoint  within  consciousness,  to  identify  him- 
self with  the  central  effort  which  consciousness  puts  forth 
in  order  to  reduce  the  world  to  terms  of  realized  experience. 
Now,  we  have  seen  that  the  standpoint  of  natural 
science  is  one  from  which  consciousness  is  not  regarded  as 
a  central  agent,  but  rather  as  a  phenomenon  among  phe- 
nomena, to  be  dealt  with  in  the  same  objective  and  external 
way  in  which  all  other  phenomena  are  treated.  In 
natural  science  consciousness  must  even  submit  to  a  kind 
of  subordination  to  the  physical.  The  physical  fact  is  a 
phenomenon  or  movement  in  which  the  nature  of  things 
gives  itself  a  first-hand  utterance,  whereas  the  fact  of 
consciousness  is  an  epi-phenomenon,  a  secondary  and  col- 
lateral expression  of  this  nature  of  things.  From  the 
point  of  view  called  metaphysical,  the  order  of  values  is 
reversed  and  consciousness  becomes  central  and  dominant 
in  the  world.  The  inner  point  of  view  is  that  of  internal 
agency  from  which  the  whole  effort  of  consciousness  pro- 
ceeds and  in  relation  to  which  the  whole  object  is  to  be 
regarded  as  possible  content  of  experience.     We  have  seen 


chap.i.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEE.  33 

that  the  primal  impulse  of  a  conscious  being  is  emoto- 
volitional  rather  than  cognitive;  it  is  that  activity  in  which 
consciousness  seeks  to  realize  its  world  in  terms  of  reality, 
and,  therefore,  in  the  lasl  analysis,  in  terms  of  itself. 
<  lonsciousness  will  therefore  assert  its  own  primacy  in  the 
world  and  will  insist  that  its  interpretations  shall  be  made 
under  the  rubrics  of  conscious  activity  itself.  It  is  here 
thai  we  come  upon  a  most  fundamental  distinction  between 
the  reflective  points  of  view  of  natural  science  and  meta- 
physics. From  the  former,  consciousness  is  but  a  circum- 
stance in  the  world  and  not  one  of  first-rate  importance, 
but  of  value  secondary  to  the  physical.  Natural  science 
will  not  permit  consciousness  to  dictate  its  own  terms  to 
the  object,  but  on  the  contrary  subordinates  it  to  the  terms 
of  the  objective.  This  is  seen  in  its  favorite  way  of  dealing 
with  psychic  phenomena.  A  fact  of  consciousness  can 
obtain  full  vested  rights  in  natural  science  only  when  it 
is  bound  to  a  physical  fact  which  becomes  sponsor  for  its 
behavior.  Only  in  this  psycho-physical  relation  can  con- 
scious phenomena  achieve  full  scientific  standing.  Hut  the 
metaphysical  world  is  the  world  of  consciousness  itself. 
Consciousness  here  becomes  primate,  and  the  physical  only 
achieves  full  metaphysical  dignity  when  it  is  able  to  trace 
its  lineage  from  mind.  We  might  define  the  attitude  of 
natural  science  as  that  of  indifference  to  consciousness, 
while  that  of  metaphysics  is  identical  with  the  attitude 
which  consciousness  takes  toward  the  world  in  its  effort 
to  realize  it.  In  one  case  consciousness  is  a  circumstance; 
in  the  other  the  very  heart  of  the  world  itself. 

Let  us  see,  then,  how  the  internal  method  works  out  ami 
how  it  leads  to  a  view  of  the  world  differing  from  that  of 
natural  science.  When  a  physical  object  acts,  we  infer 
that  it  has  been  set  in  motion  by  the  impact  of  some  other 
object.  AVe  do  not  ascribe  its  action  to  any  inner  impulse. 
but  say,  in  popular  language,  that  motion  has  been  com- 
municated to  it  by  the  impact  of  another  body.  And 
we  are  confirmed  in  this  by  finding  that  the  other  body  has 
3 


34  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

lost  a  quantity  of  motion  equal  to  that  which  the  first  has 
gained.  It  is  a  phenomenon  of  transference  through  im- 
pact. If,  however,  it  is  a  conscious  object  which  moves,  this 
form  of  explanation  no  longer  suffices.  The  conscious 
object  has  an  inner  nature,  which  we  call  impulse,  that 
is  not  communicable  from  object  to  object,  but  holds 
in  it  the  initiative  of  conscious  activity.  The  outer, 
observable  phenomenon  will  be  very  much  the  same  as  in 
the  other  instance.  There  will  be  some  kind  of  external 
stimulus  through  impact  or  otherwise,  and  this  stimulus 
will  give  rise  to  movement  in  the  conscious  body.  But  a 
difference  will  arise  in  the  fact  that  we  cannot  now  predict 
with  certainty  the  kind  or  the  quantity  of  the  resulting 
action.  It  is  not  now  a  simple  matter  of  transference, 
but  we  call  it  response,  reaction.  And  when  we  connect 
the  phenomena  with  their  internal  impulse,  the  stimulation 
takes  on  the  character  of  inducement,  while  the  initiative 
of  motion  finds  its  place  in  the  conscious  impulse  which 
becomes  active  in  view  of  the  stimulation  which  it  regards, 
or  learns  to  regard,  as  a  satisfying  or  non-satisfying  object. 
In  this  case,  then,  the  real  initiative  is  taken  away  from 
the  object  and  is  assumed  by  consciousness,  and  the  move- 
ment which  arises  is  one  of  conscious  reaction  upon  some 
feature  of  the  objective  world  with  a  view  to  appropriating 
it  and  reducing  it  to  some  form  of  realized  content. 

This  may  serve  as  a  typical  instance  of  the  mode 
in  which  the  emoto-volitional  consciousness  reacts  upon  its 
world.  The  causal  antecedent  of  the  physical  world  be- 
comes the  inducing  end  of  the  mental  world.  The  real 
initiative  is  transferred  from  the  physical  cause  to  what 
would  be  called  the  effect,  were  the  transaction  strictly  one 
of  the  physical  world;  to  the  conscious  impulse  itself 
whose  reaction  is  simply  a  making  for  that  which  it  desires, 
or  from  that  which  it  hates  and  repugnates.  Taking  this 
instance  as  typical  we  see  how  from  this  inner  point  of  view 
the  whole  world  becomes  food  for  consciousness,  and  its 
possible   content.     The   objective   world   stands   related  to 


CHAP.L  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEE.  35 

the  conscious  activity  as  desired  end  and  as  realizable 
content.  It  is  a  doctrine  of  modern  psychology,  for  which 
James  is  one  of  the  leading  sponsors,  that  the  character- 
istic movement  of  consciousness  is  end-seeking ;  that  where- 
ever  you  find  the  least  fragment  of  consciousness,  it  tends 
to  roll  itself  up  in  a  ball,  so  to  speak,  and  to  aim  at  some- 
thing. This  we  contend  for  here.  What  distinguishes 
conscious  movement  fundamentally  from  physical  move- 
ment is  its  end-seeking  form,  its  teleological  rather  than 
mechanical  character.  This  may  be  taken,  then,  as  the 
first  and  most  fundamental  determination  of  the  way  in 
which  consciousness  moving  internally  reacts  upon  its 
world. 

It  will  be  seen,  then,  that  metaphysics  finds  its  ground- 
form  and  motive  in  the  activity  of  the  emoto- volitional 
consciousness.  We  do  not  mean  to  say,  however,  that 
metaphysics  is  purely  an  affair  of  emotion  and  will.  What 
we  are  really  aiming  at  is  something  much  more  profound. 
We  have  seen  how  in  general  the  practical  effort  to  master 
the  world  gives  rise  to  a  cognitive  activity  which  becomes 
the  directive  agency  of  the  whole  movement.  Science  thus 
originates  from  a  practical  motive,  although  itself  a 
theoretic  activity.  In  like  manner  the  emoto- volitional 
effort  of  the  inner  consciousness  holds  in  it  from  the  outset 
a  cognitive  potency  which  soon  develops  into  theoretic 
form.  Natural  science,  arising  as  a  mode  of  pure  objective 
description  and  definition,  naturally  develops  a  form  of 
activity  that  is  indifferent  to  the  conscious  subject  and 
conforms  to  the  type  of  objective  movement.  It  is  me- 
chanical  rather  than  teleological.  But  metaphysics  has  ils 
vital  roots  in  the  form  and  substance  of  the  emoto-volitional 
nature  of  consciousness.  In  its  mode,  therefore,  it  con- 
forms to  the  type  of  subject-movement  rather  than  to  that 
of  objective  movement.  Its  form  will  thus  be  end-seeking 
or  teleological  and  its  whole  construction  of  the  world  of 
objectivity  will  take  the  form  of  an  effort  to  bring  it  under 
the  categories  of  teleological  finality.     Let  us  seek,  then, 


36  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

to  determine  some  of  the  categories  of  the  metaphysical 
process.  Starling  with  the  fact  that  the  form  of  activity 
with  which  metaphysics  deals  is  teleological  rather  than 
mechanical,  we  may  proceed  both  progressively  and  regres- 
sively  from  it  as  a  starting-point.  We  must  connect  end- 
seeking  with  the  quality  of  consciousness  of  which  James 
has  spoken;  that  is,  with  its  inveterate  tendency  (necessity 
would  not  be  too  strong)  to  roll  itself  up  in  a  ball;  or,  in 
short,  to  constitute  itself  a  bona  fide  self.  Selfhood  seems 
to  be  of  the  essence  of  consciousness  just  as  thinghood  is  of 
the  essence  of  the  physical  world.  It  is  clear  that  there  can 
be  no  end-seeking  movement  where  there  is  not  at  least  a 
rudimentary  self.  It  is  inconceivable  that  anything  lack- 
ing the  fundamental  qualities  of  selfhood  should  become 
a  bearer  of  consciously  sought  ends.  Moving  toward  an 
end  from  the  initiative  of  an  inner  impulse  is  just  the  way 
of  expressing  the  characteristic  movement  of  a  self.  Noth- 
ing but  a  self  is  capable  of  such  action,  and  when  this  is 
abstracted  from  consciousness,  the  substance  of  self  seems 
also  to  have  disappeared. 

If  we  connect  the  teleological  form  of  conscious  activity 
with  self  as  its  subject  or  bearer,  the  form  of  activity  we 
have  described  becomes  the  characteristic  way  in  which  a 
self  reacts  upon  the  world  in  order  to  realize  it,  and  the 
categories  which  arise  to  define  the  result  as  a  whole  will 
be  the  great  interpretative  norms  which  express  to  us 
the  metaphysical  meaning  of  the  world.  Natural  science, 
as  we  saw,  construes  its  phenomenal  world  under  the  cate- 
gories of  space,  time,  cause  and  substance,  and  the  mode 
by  which  changes  are  produced  and  propagated  is  that  of 
physical  causation,  outer  impact  and  transference.  In  all 
this  any  ideal  of  order  or  rationality  which  may  be  involved 
will  come  out  at  the  end  as  a  result,  and  will  not  be  observed 
in  the  beginning  of  the  process.  Metaphysics,  on  the  con- 
trary, is  committed  from  the  start  to  the  form  of  end- 
seeking  in  which  the  objective,  inducing  term  is  some  ideal 
to  be  realized.     So  long  as  this  ideal  stands  simply  as  an 


chap.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS   KNOWEE.  37 

aim  for  the  satisfaction  of  the  emoto- volition  a]  subject  it 
will  have  little  real  metaphysical  significance  aparl  I 
the  teleological  form  of  activity  which  it  supplies.  The 
real  germ  of  the  metaphysical  construction  of  the  world 
arises  when  the  conscious  self  begins  to  refleel  on  this 
form  of  activity  and  derives  from  it  the  principles  of 
world-explanation.  Let  us  ask,  then,  how  reflection  pro- 
ceeds to  derive  these  principles?  In  the  first  place  we  saw 
that  natural  science  adopts  physical  causation  as  the 
principle  by  which  changes  are  produced  and  propagated 
in  the  physical  world.  Metaphysically  the  principle  which 
corresponds  to  this  is  end-seeking  or  finality.  Now  finality, 
when  connected  with  the  emoto-volitional  activity  of  self, 
becomes  the  principle  of  the  intentional  realization  of  ends. 
To  this  form  of  activity  Koyce  has  applied  the  terms 
purpose  and  purposive,  and  we  adopt  his  phraseology  here. 
Let  us  say,  then,  that  the  intention  in  which  a  conscious 
self  directs  its  activity  to  the  realization  of  an  ideal  end 
is  a  purpose,  and  that  all  such  activity  is  fundamentally 
purposive  in  its  character.  Purpose  will  then  stand  as  the 
metaphysical  correspondent  of  physical  cause,  and  meta- 
physical results  will  be  purposively  determined  rather  than 
determined  by  physical  causation. 

Having  found  in  purpose  the  metaphysical  equivalenl 
of  physical  causation,  where  shall  we  seek  for  da  I  a  which 
will  enable  us  to  universalize  our  category  into  a  principle 
of  world-explanation?  Natural  science  finds  the  ground 
of  its  universalization  of  cause  in  the  notion  of  uniform 
and  stable  forces  of  which  the  phenomena  are  conceived 
to  be  effects.  Without  this  assurance  the  extension  of 
cause  beyond  a  few  particular  instances  would  be  pre- 
carious. But  the  notion  of  a  uniform  and  stable  nature 
supplies  a  point  of  view  from  which  the  analogies  of 
physical  causation  may  be  translated  into  the  certitudes 
of  science.  Where,  then,  in  the  field  of  metaphysical 
explanation  shall  we  find  the  equivalent  of  this  fun- 
damental   faith    of   science?     What,    we    may    ask  as     a 


38  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

preliminary  question,  is  the  real  significance  of  this  pre- 
sumption of  natural  science?  for  that  it  is  a  presumption 
and  not  a  provable  proposition,  will  be  conceded.  The 
answer  is  clear.  Science  must  presume  the  rationality  of 
the  world  before  it  can  have  any  assurance  of  its  stability. 
We  do  not  mean  to  say  that  science  postulates  any  actual 
reason  in  the  world,  but  it  must  and  does  assume  that 
the  movements  of  the  world  will  be  reasonable  in  the 
sense  of  being  uniform  and  stable,  while  of  this  uni- 
formity and  stability  no  proof  is  possible.  Now,  a  like 
situation  is  encountered  in  dealing  with  the  issues  of 
metaphysics.  Here  the  equivalent  of  the  principle  of 
natural  causation  is  purpose.  Purpose  embodies  the  form 
of  final  agency.  But  the  purposes  of  the  world,  like 
its  physical  movements,  require  to  be  universalized. 
A I  eta  physics  rationalizes  the  world  by  presuming  the 
uniformity  and  stability  of  the  purposive  agency  of  the 
world.  But  it  can  only  achieve  this  in  making  the 
ultimate  purpose  of  the  world  all-comprehending  by  indu- 
ing this  purpose  with  a  thought  that  grasps  the  whole  of 
the  real  in  an  act  of  prevision. 

Applying  the  terms  physical  and  metaphysical  to  the 
two  points  of  view  from  which  consciousness  seeks  to  know 
and  realize  the  w^orld,  let  us  consider  in  a  paragraph  the 
relation  of  these  two  points  of  view.  It  is  claimed  some- 
times that  the  standpoint  of  natural  science  is  exhaustive 
of  knowledge  and  metaphysics  is  denounced  as  a  dream. 
On  the  other  hand,  it  is  not  without  precedent  that  extrava- 
gant claims  have  been  made  for  metaphysics.  The  meta- 
physician may  go  so  far  as  to  deny  the  reality  of  the  whole 
aspect  of  the  world  in  which  natural  science  is  interested. 
It  would  seem  more  rational,  however,  to  ask  whether 
either  point  of  view,  taken  abstractly,  can  be  exhaustive 
of  knowledge ;  whether,  in  truth,  both  points  of  view  may 
not  require  to  be  occupied  in  order  to  fill  up  the  measure 
of  knowledge.  What  is  it  that  leads  science  on  in  its 
everlasting    quest    of    knowledge?     Well,    it    is   largely    a 


chap.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWER.  39 

practical  demand.  Man  finds  that  he  needs  more  knowl- 
edge in  order  to  attain  his  good.  But  beyond  this  he 
demands  the  rationality  of  the  world,  and  this  he  gathers 
up  in  a  great  presumption  which  serves  as  the  ground-work 
of  science  as  a  whole.  There  could  be  no  stable  science  in 
an  irrational  world.  What,  again,  is  it  that  actuates  man 
in  his  everlasting  quest  for  the  metaphysical  significance 
of  the  world  .'  Partly,  no  doubt,  the  pressure  of  his  higher 
moral  and  spiritual  wants.  In  relation  to  the  highest  good 
the  problems  of  God  and  immortality  are  momentous. 
But  beyond  this  pressure  there  is  the  demand  for  the 
supreme  rationality  of  the  world.  This  becomes  meta- 
physically necessary  just  as  the  same  demand  on  a  lower 
plane  has  become  scientifically  necessary.  This  rational 
demand  leads  to  the  completion  of  the  metaphysical  task. 
Have  we  not  need  of  both  the  physical  and  the  metaphysi- 
cal instruments  in  order  to  fill  out  the  measure  of  knowl- 
edge? Onr  answer  to  this  question  will  depend  on  our 
conception  of  the  nature  of  knowledge  and  its  relation  to 
the  knowing  subject.  It  is  said  that  knowledge  is  acquaint- 
ance with  fact,  and  this  is  true  as  far  as  it  goes.  But  it 
is  only  the  beginning.  Knowledge  is  the  understanding  of 
fact,  the  fixing  of  its  place  in  some  system  of  reality,  the 
determination  of  its  meaning  as  a  part  of  this  system. 
That  is  the  wliat  of  knowledge.  But  why  should  this 
understanding  of  fact  be  necessary?  The  fact  makes  no 
demand.  The  object  does  not  need  knowledge.  It  is  the 
subject  that  makes  the  demand, — that  needs  knowledge. 
For  any  knowledge  beyond  the  mere  acquaintance  with 
fact,  the  final  cause  is  a  demand  of  the  subject,  and  this 
demand  will  arise  either  as  a  means  of  satisfying  some1 
clamoring  wants  of  the  subject  on  the  practical  side,  or 
some  theoretic  need  of  the  subject.  Let  us  trace  briefly  the 
rise  of  these  requirements.  Science  originated  historically 
in  scraps  and  in  obedience  to  particular  practical  needs. 
These  scraps,  at  first  isolated  from  one  another  but  not 
from  the  life  of  man,  through  an  organizing  instinct  of 


40  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

man's  consciousness  were  brought  together  into  relations 
of  coherency  so  that  they  began  to  take  the  form  of  systems 
of  truth.  Finally,  these  organized  truths,  resting  as  yet 
on  empirical  grounds,  were  translated  to  rational  grounds 
through  an  instinct  of  man's  consciousness  which  leu- Is 
him  to  seek;  not  simply  to  observe  and  organize,  but  to 
understand  the  truths  of  his  system.  We  find,  then,  that 
science,  starting  with  the  effort  to  satisfy  detached  practi- 
cal needs,  very  soon  transcends  this  plane  and  begins 
to  organize  the  fragments  in  obedience  to  a  demand 
Cor  unity.  And,  finally,  science  not  only  requires  the 
organization  of  its  elements  into  the  unity  of  a  system, 
but  it  demands  to  know  the  reasons  for  their  uniform  and 
stable  occupancy  of  the  place  to  which  they  have  been 
assigned  in  the  system.  We  have,  then,  as  the  determining 
end-motives  of  science,  standing  in  the  order  of  their  rise 
and  development,  the  clamor  of  detached  practical  demands, 
the  further  demand  for  unitary  system  and  the  demand 
for  the  rationale  of  the  parts  of  this  system.  In  this  proc- 
ess the  object,  considered  as  distinct  from  the  subject, 
supplies  simply  the  plurality  of  facts  or  existential  points, 
while  the  whole  requirement  of  generalization,  organization 
and  rationalization  is  directly  rooted  in  the  nature  of  the 
conscious  subject.  It  is,  then,  the  nature  of  the  conscious 
subject,  and  not  that  of  the  object  investigated,  which  deter- 
mines the  rise  and  development  of  knowledge. 

This  being  the  case,  we  are  in  a  position  to  ask  the 
further  question,  whether  the  subject's  whole  demand  for 
knowledge,  so  far  as  that  demand  is  legitimate,  can  be 
satisfied  by  natural  science.  In  order  to  answer  this  ques- 
tion we  have  first  to  decide  whether  the  whole  demand  for 
knowledge  be  satisfied  with  even  a  rational  construction  of 
the  movements  or  behavior  of  things  while  the  things 
themselves  in  their  own  inner  nature  remain  hidden  from 
us.  In  the  first  place,  AVhy  should  we  not  rest  satisfied 
with  natural  science  and  the  instrument,  it  supplies  to  us 
for  the  satisfaction  of  our  practical  and  theoretic  wants6/ 


chap.  I.  CONSCIOUSNESS  AS  KNOWEE.  41 

The  answer  is  twofold.  The  conscious  subject  has  an 
inner  nature  of  which  it  is  immediately  conscious,  and  this 
nature  stands  related  as  grounding-principle  to  the  phe- 
nomena of  its  conscious  world.  We  have  seen  that  the 
standpoint  of  metaphysics  is  that  of  the  inner  nature  of 
the  conscious  subject,  and  that  its  central  motive  is  the 
effort  of  consciousness  itself  to  overcome  and  realize  its 
world.  Naturally,  then,  a  theoretic  demand  which  arose 
from  this  source  would  be  for  a  more  than  phenomenal 
knowledge  of  its  object ;  in  short,  it  would  be  a  demand  for 
some  insight  into  the  inner  nature  of  its  object.  Again, 
this  demand  for  a  knowledge  of  the  inner  nature  of  things 
would  not  be  formless  and  empty-handed.  The  form  it  would 
take  would  be  that  of  a  search  by  the  subject-nature  for  a 
kindred  nature  in  the  object.  In  the  last  analysis,  the  subject- 
nature  of  which  the  knower  is  conscious  cannot  tolerate  the 
idea  of  an  alien  nature  in  the  object.  It  seeks  itself  in  its 
world,  and  it  comes  to  this  search  armed  with  certain 
analogies  of  its  own  nature  which  supply  it  with  its  leading 
categories  of  interpretation. 

Now,  the  truth  of  this  may  be  recognized  and  still  the 
procedure  of  metaphysics  may  be  stigmatized  as  vain  and 
empty  speculation.  In  view  of  this  let  us  consider  the  real 
motive  of  metaphysics,  which  is,  in  the  first  instance, 
simply  the  pressure  of  certain  great  wants  of  our  being. 
Let  us  call  the  inner  nature  of  which  we  are  conscious, 
spiritual,  in  order  to  distinguish  it  from  the  physical 
nature,  which  is  the  object  of  natural  science.  Now  this 
spiritual  nature  utters  itself  in  several  great  and  charac- 
teristic needs.  There  is,  first,  the  requirement  of  freedom : 
it  requires  to  be  assured  that  the  inner  nature  of  things 
whose  outer  movements  obey  the  law  of  physical  causation, 
shall  not  be  alien  to  its  own  agency  which  is  that  of  self- 
initiative  and  self-determination.  Secondly,  there  is  the 
problem  of  destiny:  it  requires  to  be  assured  that  the  inner 
nature  of  things  which  manifests  itself  in  perishable 
phenomena  shall  not  be  hostile  to  its  own  perdurability 


42  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

It  could  have  no  place  in  a  world  that  is  perishable  at  its 
heart.  Finally,  there  is  the  question  of  God;  it  asks  to  be 
assured  that  at  the  foundation  of  the  world  there  is  an 
eternal  being  akin  to  itself  in  which  its  own  life  is  rooted 
and  its  own  ideal  interests  and  destiny  secured.  These 
great  problems  of  freedom,  immortality  and  God,  spring 
directly  out  of  the  soil  of  man's  inner  nature,  and  they 
can  be  dealt  with,  therefore,  only  as  metaphysical  issues. 
But  the  whole  of  the  metaphysical  requirement  is  not 
exhausted  in  these  demands  of  the  moral  and  spiritual  na- 
ture. We  have  seen  how  natural  science  transcends  the 
practical  motive  in  which  it  originates  and  becomes  the 
organ  of  theoretic  necessity.  This  is  also  true  of  meta- 
physics. Starting  out  with  the  effort  to  satisfy  moral  and 
spiritual  needs,  it  soon  transcends  these  motives  and  be- 
comes more  and  more  a  doctrine  of  reality.  And  its  pro- 
cedure here  finds  its  analogies  in  the  process  of  natural 
science.  Its  investigations  up  to  this  point  may  have  been 
fragmentary,  but  it  now  begins  to  respond  to  the  idea  of 
unitary  system,  and,  proceeding  on  the  analogies  of  the 
spiritual  rather  than  those  of  the  material,  develops  its 
theory  of  an  absolute  as  the  unitary  ground  of  reality. 
And,  finally,  in  order  to  completely  rationalize  the  system  of 
being,  it  incorporates  with  this  absolute  its  own  spiritual 
selfhood  as  a  stable  and  perdurable  term  in  its  theory  of 
individuality. 

We  deem  the  above  statement  sufficient  to  prove  not 
only  that  there  is  a  normal  demand  for  both  natural  science 
and  metaphysics,  but  also  that  both  are  required  to  fill  up 
the  measure  of  that  knowledge  which  man  is  prompted  to 
seek.  To  determine  the  question  of  the  possibility  of  such 
knowledge  is,  in  a  sense,  the  object  of  this  entire  inquiry. 


CHAPTER   II 


GEOUND-PEINCIPLES. 


We  have  found  that  the  effort  to  know  takes  on  the  two 
forms  which  we  have  named  natural  science  and  meta- 
physics, and  we  have  discovered  also  that  both  efforts  are 
normal  and  stand  in  their  own  right.  Here  we  are  directly 
concerned  with  the  knowing-process,  and  our  aim  is  to  dis- 
cover and  formulate  the  fundamental  principles  of  its  two 
main  types.  We  saw  in  our  analysis  of  the  natural  science- 
process  in  the  last  chapter  that  in  connection  with  its 
empirical  activity  there  arise  certain  categories  or  uni- 
versals  which  enable  it  to  reduce  its  body  of  truth  to 
rational  form.  Now  our  quest  for  a  fundamental  prin- 
ciple will  be  along  the  line  of  these  rational  forms.  The 
rational  forms  which  emerged  were  space,  time,  cause  and 
substance.  And  we  saw  that  if  we  apply  the  concepts  of 
space  and  time  as  supplying  the  norms  of  continuity  and 
discreteness,  to  the  un analyzed  plurality  of  the  phenomenal 
world,  there  arise  what  are  called  the  methods  of  pure 
quantitative  determination.  We  shall  find  it  necessary  at 
this  point  to  carry  the  analysis  of  these  methods  farther 
than  was  deemed  necessary  in  the  preceding  chapter.  The 
unanalyzed  plurality  of  the  phenomenal  world  contains  in 
germ  the  notions  of  whole  and  parts,  but  it  is  necessary  to 
apply  to  it  the  ideas  of  quantity  developed  in  geometry 
and  number  in  order  to  bring  these  notions  into  clear- 
ness.     Without    delaying    here    to    analyze    the    processes 

43 


44  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

through  which  the  mathematical  consciousness  comes  to 
the  clear  apprehension  of  the  notion  of  whole  and  parts,  it 
will  be  sufficient  to  note  the  fact.  The  aspect  of  the  phe- 
nomenal world  on  which  the  mathematical  cousciousness 
seizes  is  that  which  is  expressed  in  the  idea  of  a  whole 
made  up  of  the  sum  of  its  parts,  a  whole,  therefore,  which  is 
exactly  identical  Avith  the  sum  of  its  parts,  and,  on  the 
other  hand,  the  idea  of  a  plurality  of  parts  or  units  which, 
when  combined,  become  exactly  identical  with  the  whole. 
Let  us  add  to  this,  complete  abstraction  from  differences  of 
quality  and  what  the  mathematicians  call  commutative- 
ness,  that  is,  absolute  indifference  as  to  the  position  of 
any  part  in  the  order  of  parts,  and  we  shall  have  fairly 
enough  determined  the  aspect  of  the  world  with  which 
mathematics  deals  and  which  it  calls  quantitative.  Such 
a  world  will  be  characterized  by  the  mutual  indifference 
of  its  parts  so  far  as  quality  is  concerned,  and  by  their 
ability  to  maintain  themselves  in  all  combinations  and 
separations,  unmodified  as  to  their  quantity.  If,  for 
example,  x  could  change  its  value  in  the  course  of  an 
operation,  the  solution  of  no  problem  in  which  x  is  involved 
would  be  possible.  But  the  whole  mathematical  process 
depends  on  the  existence  of  parts  which  possess  defined  and 
stable  values,  and  its  operations  in  general  are  reducible  to 
the  separation  and  combination  of  these  parts  and  the 
determination  of  their  equivalence. 

Now,  it  is  clear  that  wherever  our  world  presents 
phenomena  which  can  be  depended  on  to  maintain  definite 
and  stable  values,  the  mathematical  method  supplies  the 
form  which  the  knowledge-process  will  normally  assume. 
The  questions  Ave  ask  here,  then,  are:  (1)  AArhat  is  the  limit 
of  this  sphere  of  definite  and  stable  values,  and  (2)  What 
is  the  ground-principle  of  science  in  this  field?  The 
answer  to  the  first  question  will  be  found  by  referring  to 
the  fact  that  the  phenomena  we  are  dealing  with  here  are 
those  of  space  and  time.  These  may  be  called  the  forms 
in    which   the    world   presents    itself    immediately   to    our 


chap.  ii.  GROUND-PEINCIPLES.  45 

sense-perceptions.  It  is  in  connection  with  space  and  time 
thai  the  unanalyzed  plurality  of  the  world  takes  on  the 
forms  of  dimensional  continuity  and  serial  discreteness, 
and  thus  grounds  the  distinctions  of  continuous  and  discrete 
quantity.  This  distinction  which  underlies  the  whole  of 
mathematics  will  naturally  determine  the  limit  of  its  appli- 
cation. Wherever  our  phenomena  are  such  that  they  can 
be  reduced  to  terms  of  continuous  or  discrete  quantity, 
that  is,  to  terms  of  geometry  or  number,  they  will  be  amen- 
able to  the  mathematical  method;  otherwise  they  will  not. 
And  inasmuch  as  space  and  time  supply  the  forms  which 
render  the  basal  distinctions  of  mathematics  possible,  it 
follows  that  they  also  determine  the  limit  of  the  application 
of  its  method  to  phenomena.  We  come,  then,  to  the  second 
question,  What  is  the  ground-principle  of  science  in  this 
field?  We  have  to  bear  in  mind  here  that  mathematics 
deals  with  a  world  that  is  conceived  under  the  notions  of 
whole  and  parts.  Its  direct  transactions  are  with  the  parts 
which  it  conceives  as  constituting  the  whole.  Now,  it  is 
important  here  that  we  distinguish  between  a  principle  of 
procedure  and  a  ground-principle  which  underlies  the 
whole  of  procedure  as  its  necessary  presumption.  It  is  the 
latter  we  are  seeking  here,  but  in  order  to  find  it  we  must 
pass  through  the  former.  The  principle  of  procedure  is 
clearly  that  of  the  quantitative  equivalence  of  the  parts 
wdth  which  the  process  deals.  The  whole  efficacy  of  mathe- 
matical calculation  depends  on  the  general  possibility  of 
finding  parts  which  may  be  used  as  exact  measures  of  other 
parts,  and  its  procedure  in  general  will  be  found  to  be  the 
application  of  these  measure-units  to  the  mass  of  phe- 
nomena, thus  reducing  them  to  a  system  of  definite  equiva- 
lents to  which  mathematical  analysis  and  synthesis  may  be 
applied.  The  principle  here  indicated  is  that  of  the  quan- 
titative equivalence  of  parts  and  may  be  stated  as  follows: 
All  the  parts  or  phenomena  dealt  with  in  mathematics  are 
capable  of  reduction  to  equivalents  of  terms  with  which 
the  mathematician  carries  on  his  calculations,  which  terms 


46  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

represent  to  him  definite  and  stable  values.  If  the  law 
of  equivalence  be  regarded  as  the  law  of  the  relation  of  the 
parts  in  a  mathematical  world,  it  may  well  be  doubted 
whether  there  is  any  more  fundamental  article  of  mathe- 
matical faith  than  this.  What  has  a  mathematician  to  do 
further  than  with  the  parts  of  his  world?  We  answer, 
that  whether  conscious  of  the  fact  or  not,  he  has  to  do  with 
his  world  as  a  whole.  The  whole  of  mathematics  is  the 
notion  of  a  quantity  which  is  equal  to  the  sum  of  all 
its  parts,  and  is  not,  therefore,  a  notion  of  comprehension 
or  inclusion.  It  is  not  an  organic  relation  in  any  sense,  but 
simply  one  of  equivalence  or  quantitative  identity.  The 
principle  may  be  expressed  in  the  formula  a=fr  in  which 
a  represents  the  whole  and  o  the  sum  of  all  its  parts.  And 
the  formula  being  one  of  exact  equivalence  will  be  true 
when  stated  in  the  reverse  order  b=a,  which  asserts  that  the 
sum  of  all  the  parts  in  any  given  system  of  phenomena  is 
equal  to  the  whole.  In  short,  the  ground-principle  of 
mathematics  is  simply  a  formula  which  expresses  the  kind 
of  world  with  which  mathematics  deals  in  its  concepts  and 
processes.  It  is  a  world  that  is  made  up  of  a  plurality  of 
definitely  determinable  parts  the  sum  of  which  constitutes 
the  whole,  and  the  mathematical  whole  is  simply  a  sum,  the 
sum  of  all  the  parts  and  never  anything  more  or  less. 
Now,  the  highest  rationality  of  the  mathematical  world  will 
be  expressed  in  the  principle  which  connects  its  phe- 
nomena with  the  conception  of  a  whole  that  is  their  ideal 
sum  and  equivalent. 

But  we  have  seen  that  the  mathematical  aspect  of  the 
world  does  not  exhaust  its  whole  meaning  for  science,  and 
that  there  is  a  point  where  the  mathematical  presumption 
of  the  mutual  indifference  of  the  parts  of  the  world  to  their 
order  breaks  down  and  we  enter  the  field  of  a  different 
kind  of  relation.  This  whole  field  may  be  represented  as 
that  of  natural  causation  in  which  the  presumption  is  one 
of  dynamic  influence,  and  the  mutual  interdependence  of 
the  parts  of  the  world.     AVe  have  already  denned  natural 


chap.  ii.  GROUND-PRINCIPLES.  47 

cause  as  the  principle  that  accounts  for  the  position  of  any 
given  phenomenon,  a,  in  the  phenomenal  system  to  which  it 
belongs.  It  presupposes,  therefore,  conditioning  relations 
among  the  terms  of  which  the  world  is  made  up,  and  rests 
on  the  conception  of  a  system  of  interdependent  parts. 
The  mathematical  world,  as  we  saw,  represents  indifference 
to  all  this.  There  is  no  relation  of  part  to  part,  or  of  parts 
to  whole,  presupposed,  except  that  of  quantitative  equiva- 
lence ;  whereas,  in  the  world  of  natural  causation,  quanti- 
tative equivalence  is  not  directly  involved.  What  is 
involved  directly  is  qualitative  change,  and  this  takes  place 
in  a  transaction  which  we  call  transference.  For  in  the 
causal  formula,  ay^b,  the  b-term  is  a  change  or  modification 
which  appears  as  something  new  in  the  phenomenal  series, 
something  which  the  world  was  lacking  until  some  influence, 
in  or  symbolized  by,  the  phenomenon  or  group  of  phe- 
nomena which  we  call  a,  induced  its  appearance.  Now,  it 
is  clear  that  this  new  phenomenon  b  could  not  be  produced 
in  vacuo,  but  must  arise  as  a  modification  or  modified  form 
of  some  situation  which  already  exists ;  and  it  is  just  as  clear 
that  if  the  phenomenon  or  group  which  we  call  a  remained 
unchanged  it  could  not  account  for  the  appearance  of  b. 
AYe  shall  come  nearer  to  the  truth,  however,  if  wre  conceive 
the  causal  term  as  some  change  or  modification  which  arises 
in  a.  Let  us  call  this  x;  the  effect  b,  on  the  other  hand, 
will  be  better  represented  by  some  change  or  modification 
which  arises  in  b  and  to  which  Ave  may  apply  the  symbol  y. 
AVhen,  therefore,  a  is  said  to  be  the  cause  of  b,  what  is 
really  meant  is  that  the  connection  between  a  and  b  is  such 
that  any  change  or  modification  x  occurring  in  a  gives  rise 
to  some  change  or  modification  y  in  b;  and  the  whole  result 
of  the  transaction  is  a  system  in  which  the  interdependent 
terms  a  and  b  have  given  place  to  the  modified  terms  ax, 
by,  or,  if  we  do  not  wish  to  express  the  specific  nature  of 
the  change,  a',  b',  and  these  will  still  continue  in  the  rela- 
tion of  interdependence  and  therefore  in  that  of  causation, 
and  may  be  expressed  in  our  altered  world  by  the  formula 


48  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

a'Xb'  which  leads  in  like  manner  to  a"Xfi"  and  so  on  ad 
infinitum. 

It  is  obvious  that  we  have  here  the  phenomenon  of 
mutual  influence,  of  parts  of  the  world  affecting  the  char- 
acter or  movements  of  other  parts,  and  that,  not  after  the 
manner  of  addition  and  subtraction  which  leaves  its  terms 
qualitatively  unchanged,  but  rather,  in  a  way  which  induces 
change  of  quality,  or  generation  as  well  as  change  of  quan- 
tity. For,  were  the  change  contemplated  here  simply  one 
of  quantity,  it  would  be  expressible  in  changes  of  position 
and  combination,  while  the  terms  themselves  would  remain 
unmodified.  But  in  a  world  of  mutual  influence  this  indif- 
ference no  longer  exists,  and  dynamic  changes  mean 
changes  in  the  character  of  the  terms  themselves.  They 
become  different  through  modification  of  character,  and 
this  goes  on  incessantly  so  that  our  a,  b,  is  constantly  passing 
into  a',  I)',  and  so  on  without  end.  The  sphere  of  natural 
causation  is  thus  one  of  qualitative  change  in  which  the 
characters  of  phenomena  are  subject  to  mutual  alteration. 
The  presumptions  of  indifference  and  exact  equivalence  of 
parts  must  then  be  given  up,  and  we  must  search  for  other 
grounds  on  which  the  sciences  of  natural  causation  may 
found  their  procedure.  We  have  seen  that  the  security  of 
mathematics  arises  out  of  the  definiteness  and  stability  of 
the  terms  which  it  uses  in  its  calculations.  Its  a 's  and  b  's 
remain  always  a,  b,  unmodified  and  its  world  is  the  equiva- 
lent of  a  definite  sum  of  these  fixed  quantities.  In  the 
world  of  natural  causation  everything  is  different;  the 
phenomena  with  which  science  deals  are  changing  while 
passing  through  her  hands.  A  change  in  phenomenon  a 
which  translates  it  into  a'  is  followed  by  a  corresponding 
change  in  b,  a  related  phenomenon  which  translates  it  into 
b',  and  presto !  the  whole  world  is  transformed.  Further- 
more, this  is  not  an  accident  of  the  world  of  natural  causa- 
tion. It  is  rather  its  normal  habit.  For  it  is  with  the 
phenomenon  of  qualitative  change,  a  world  whose  phe- 
nomena are  incessantly  changing  their  character,  that  the 


chap.  n.  GROUND-PEINCIPLES.  49 

sciences  of  natural  causation,  which  I  shall  henceforth  call 
the  physical  sciences,  have  to  do,  and  it  is  for  a  reliable 
knowledge  of  such  a  world  as  this  that  those  sciences  must 
seek.  Their  problem  is,  therefore,  in  the  nature  of  the 
1  ase,  less  hopeful  than  that  of  mathematics.  And  its  solu- 
tion requires,  if  we  may  be  permitted  to  say  so,  a  much 
more  extensive  exercise  of  the  speculative  imagination. 
For  the  mathematician  deals  with  definite  equivalents 
which  never  change  their  values  and  his  world-unity  is 
the  immediate  achievement  of  the  summation  of  parts. 
But  the  physical  sciences  deal  with  a  world  of  incessant 
change  which  in  its  baldness  defies  knowledge  and  forces 
on  these  sciences  the  task  of  finding  in,  or  in  connection 
with,  the  mutable  world  some  relative  or  absolute  grounds 
of  stability.  AVe  have  already  described  the  process  of 
abstraction  and  generalization  of  recurrent  terms  by  means 
of  which  relative  stability  is  secured  to  the  empirical  proc- 
ess. And  we  have  also  followed  that  instinct  of  science 
which  tends  to  the  rational  grounding  of  its  empirical 
generalizations  in  its  doctrine  of  matter  which  supplies 
the  principle  of  absolute  stability  required.  It  is  right 
here,  however,  in  what  has  been  termed  "the  bookkeeping 
of  science"  that  the  call  arises  for  the  exercise  of  that 
speculative  imagination  of  which  we  spoke  above.  Meta- 
physically, it  is  an  open  question  w- nether  or  not  the  reality 
of  matter  can  be  maintained.  And  the  same  is  true  regard- 
ing the  faith  of  science  in  the  uniformity  of  nature.  If 
we  are  going  to  await  the  guarantee  of  absolute  certitude 
regarding  these  things,  then  wre  must  rest  content  without 
science;  or  at  least  with  mere  fragments  which  develop 
independently  and  without  organic  coherence.  The  phe- 
nomenal wTorld  does  not  supply  an  adequate  basis  for  the 
physical  sciences,  because  it  does  not  fulfill  the  demand 
for  stability  on  which  the  value  of  the  knowledge-process 
depends.  They  are  obliged,  therefore,  to  go  back  of  the 
presented  phenomena  of  the  world  and  to  postulate  another 
more  fundamental  system  in  which  the  demand  for  sta- 
4 


50  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

bility  is  satisfied.  And  the  procedure  of  science  here 
consists  in  regarding  this  more  fundamental  system  the 
real  world,  of  which  the  presented  world  is  to  be  taken  as 
the  symbol.  Having  made  its  empirical  generalizations  of 
these  symbols,  science  rationalizes  its  results  by  grounding 
them  in  a  system  of  elements  which  secure  their  absolute 
uniformity  and  stability. 

We  are  seeking  here  for  a  ground-principle  of  the 
sciences  of  natural  causation  which  will  be  the  correspondent 
in  this  sphere,  of  the  ground-principle  of  mathematics. 
The  ground-concept  in  mathematics,  the  one  that  expresses 
the  kind  of  a  world  with  which  the  mathematical  process 
deals,  is  that  of  whole  and  parts,  and  for  this  we  are  seek- 
ing an  equivalent  in  the  field  of  natural  causation.  Now, 
in  view  of  the  fact  that  the  physical  sciences  find  it  neces- 
sary, in  order  to  secure  the  needed  stability  to  the  world, 
to  connect  its  manifested  phenomena  with  more  funda- 
mental elements  which  do  not  appear,  are  we  not  right  ir 
saying  that  the  principle  for  which  we  are  seeking  is  that 
of  ground  and  phenomenon?  Mathematics  shows  that  the 
phenomenon  can  be  dealt  with  scientifically  if  regard  be 
confined  to  its  quantitative  character.  But  physical  science 
finds  that  the  quality  of  the  phenomenon  is  subject  to 
incessant  change  and  this  defeats  its  effort  to  reduce  it  to 
any  form  of  reliable  knowledge.  This  difficulty  is  only 
partially  overcome  by  the  discovery  of  uniform  recurrences 
among  phenomena.  For  we  can  never  assure  ourselves  of 
these,  and  our  world  remains  in  the  clutch  of  contingency. 
The  only  hope  for  these  sciences  lies  in  the  postulate  of  a 
world  of  stable  material  elements  underlying  the  world 
of  phenomenal  manifestations  and  entering  into  the  mani- 
festations as  the  immanent  grounds  of  their  uniformity 
and  stable  persistence. 

In  drawing  this  conclusion  we  are  not  presuming  to 
determine  what  concept  science  shall  reach,  of  the  material 
elements  she  thus  finds  it  necessary  to  postulate.  We  are 
only  anxious  here  to  show  that  the  postulate  is  a  necessity, 


chap.  ii.  GEOUND-PRINCIPLKS.  51 

and  that  the  grounds  on  which  it  rests  arc  real  rather  than 
imaginary.  The  refinements  of  the  scientific  imagination 
may  lead  to  modifications  of  the  notion  of  matter  without 
end.  It  may  well  be  that  the  ideas  of  tlio  present  will  not 
be  adequate  to  the  demands  of  science  a  decade  or  fifty 
years  hence.  But  that  physical  science  shall  ever  find 
itself  in  a  position  where  it  can  dispense  with  some  concep- 
tion of  matter  is  not  to  be  expected.  We  have  but  to 
remember  that  matter  is  only  a  name  For  that  system  of 
stable  and  perdurable  elements  on  which  the  whole  ration- 
ality of  science  reposes,  in  order  to  be  assured  on  this 
point.  How,  then,  shall  we  state  the  principle  that  will 
express  this  fundamental  fact,  and  thus  formulate  the 
notion  of  the  highest  rationality  in  the  field  of  natural 
causation?  Guided  by  mathematical  analogies  we  might 
formulate  it  somewhat  as  follows.  The  root-notion  of  the 
sciences  of  natural  causation  is  that  of  ground  and  phe- 
nomena. On  this  is  based  the  principle,  that  the  rationale 
of  the  changes  of  the  phenomenal  system  is  to  be  sought  in 
an  underlying  system  of  permanent  and  stable  elements 
which  constitute  their  ground. 

That  we  have  reached  something  fundamental  in  the 
reduction  of  the  two  generic  divisions  of  natural  science 
to  the  terms  stated  above,  there  can  be  little  question. 
That  the  idea  of  whole  and  parts  does  define  the  kind  of  a 
world  the  mathematician  has  in  mind  is  indicated  by  the 
nature  of  his  fundamental  concept  of  number.  For  if  we 
distinguish  between  the  ordinal  and  cardinal  properties 
of  number  we  shall  find  that  the  former  deals  with  things 
as  a  series  of  ordered  parts,  while  the  latter  designates 
groups  of  parts  as  wholes  or  units.  Ideally,  then,  the 
ordinal  principle  is  that  of  the  sum  of  all  the  parts  of 
the  world,  while  the  cardinal  principle  is  that  of  the  unity 
of  the  world  as  a  whole.  As  little  question  can  there  be 
as  to  whether  the  idea  of  ground  and  phenomena  repre- 
sents the  kind  of  world  with  which  the  physical  sciences 
have  to  deal.     If  we  take  the  procedure  of  physics  proper, 


52  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

as  stated  here,  it  will  be  found  that  underlying  all  the 
investigations  of  the  physicist  rests  the  presumption  that 
the  terms  with  which  he  deals  directly  are  not  real  sub- 
si  a  aces,  but  only  phenomena  or  manifestations  of  sub- 
si  a  ■  ices  or  forces  which  themselves  are  hidden  from  view 
and  can  be  approached  only  through  their  phenomenal 
movements.  The  fundamental  physical  concept,  then,  which 
characterizes  the  world  as  the  physicist  conceives  it,  is  that 
of  an  underlying  system  of  substances  or  forces  which  do 
not  appear  to  us  in  their  own  proper  persons,  but  only 
vice-gerently  in  their  manifestations.  We  may  have  occa- 
sion to  modify  this  conception  in  order  to  make  it  meta- 
physically satisfactory,  but  it  is  clearly  fundamental  to  the 
whole  physical  view  of  the  world. 

The  metaphysical  conception  of  the  world  differs  from 
that  of  natural  science,  as  we  have  seen,  in  the  point  of 
view,  method  and  aim  of  its  investigation.  It  takes  its 
departure  within  consciousness  itself,  and  identifies  itself 
with  the  central  effort  of  the  emoto-volitional  consciousness 
to  realize  the  world  by  reducing  its  objects  to  terms  of 
experience.  The  terms  by  which  it  defines  the  world  arise 
naturally  out  of  the  heart  of  the  conscious  activity,  and 
consciousness  stands  central,  not  only  as  knowing-subject, 
but  also  as  supplying  the  necessary  medium  in  and  through 
which  everything  is  realized.  While  it  is  true,  then,  that 
natural  science  approaches  externally  a  world  whose  inner 
nature  remains  hidden  behind  a  veil  of  phenomena,  the 
most  fundamental  characteristic  of  metaplrysics  is  the 
innerness  of  the  standpoint  of  its  investigation.  Meta- 
physics approaches  the  world  on  the  plane  of  its  internal 
nature,  and  nan,  therefore,  have  nothing  to  do  with  the 
presumption  of  physics  as  a  final  concept.  The  notion  of 
ground  and  phenomena  will,  of  course,  continue  to  possess 
value,  and  the  metaphysician  will  not  be  able  to  dispense 
with  it.  But  he  will  no  longer  regard  the  phenomena  of 
the  world  as  hiding  from  view  its  inner  nature  which 
remains   a  mystery.     The  presumption   of  metaphysics  is 


chap.il  GEOUND-PEINCIPLES.  53 

that  this  inner  nature  is  not  only  open  to  investigation, 
but  that,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  it  is  consciousness  itself,  and 
to  consciousness  it  looks,  therefore,  for  the  norms  of  its 
world-interpretation. 

It  is  admitted  here  that  this  presumption  is  often  veiled 
from  the  eyes  of  the  metaphysician  himself  so  that  he  con- 
tinues to  coquette  with  the  notion  of  non-conscious  reality. 
But  it  is  none  the  less  fundamental.  Let  it  be  clearly 
apprehended,  then,  that  the  metaphysical  interpretation  of 
the  world  is  one  that  professes  to  define  it  in  terms  of  its 
inner  nature  rather  than  in  terms  of  its  outer  movements. 
There  is  only  one  open  door  to  the  secrets  of  inner  nature, 
and  that  is  the  door  of  consciousness.  For  consciousness, 
by  virtue  of  its  inveterate  tendency  to  roll  itself  up  into 
the  form  of  selfhood,  lets  the  investigator  into  the  secret 
of  a  world  that  is  self-centered,  every  part  of  which  is 
consciously  related  to  every  other  part  and  all  the  parts  to 
the  inner  point  of  self-organization.  There  is,  in  truth, 
no  middle  ground  between  the  physical  conception  of  a 
nature  hidden  behind  the  veil  of  phenomena  and  the  pre- 
sumption that  in  consciousness  itself  the  norm  of  inner 
nature  in  general  stands  revealed. 

Assuming  the  truth  of  the  result  here  reached;  namely, 
that  consciousness  supplies  us  with  the  norm  of  inner 
nature,  let  us  begin  our  search  for  the  notion  that  will 
adequately  define  the  kind  of  a  world  with  which  the 
metaphysician  has  to  do.-  We  saw  in  the  preceding  chapter 
that  the  central  category  of  metaphysical  explanation  is 
that  of  purpose,  and  that  purpose  involves  a  guiding  and 
informing  idea.  In  short,  it  was  found  that  only  intelli- 
gent purpose,  an  intention  which  is  not  blind,  could  serve  as 
a  principle  of  metaphysical  interpretation.  Hut  after  all 
we  have  in  purpose  only  the  notion  of  a  form  of  activity. 
and  we  have  yet  to  determine  the  world-idea  which  rests 
at  the  basis  of  this  as  its  presupposition.  What  kind  of  a 
world-system  is  that  in  which  the  notion  of  purpose  takes 
its  place  as  its  central  and  characteristic  form  of  activity.' 


54  ANALYSIS.  parti. 

We  are  here  coming  into  close  quarters  with  the  notion 
for  which  we  are  searching.  The  physicist,  employing 
the  notion  of  natural  causation  as  his  norm,  conceives  the 
relation  between  the  world-forces  which  lie  hidden  and  the 
system  of  movements  that  lie  in  the  field  of  observation, 
to  be  one  of  ground  and  phenomena,  the  ground  being  the 
substantial  presupposition  of  the  causal  system.  Whereas, 
the  metaphysician,  employing  the  notion  of  purpose  as 
norm,  is  led  to  conceive  the  relation  between  the  inner 
world  (the  physicist's  world  of  substance)  and  that  of  its 
outer  manifestation,  as  one  of  inception  and  realiza- 
tion; or,  to  state  the  notion  more  substantively,  the  relation 
is  conceived  to  be  one  of  idea  and  reality.  Bearing  in 
mind  that  what  we  are  in  quest  of  here  is  a  conception  which 
will  define  the  world  of  the  metaphysician  in  the  same 
fundamental  sense  that  the  conceptions  of  whole  and  parts 
and  ground  and  phenomena  define  the  worlds  of  the  mathe- 
matician and  the  physicist,  the  vital  significance  of  the 
conclusion  here  reached  will  be  recognized.  The  world  of 
the  metaphysician,  like  that  of  the  mathematician  and  the 
physicist,  is  dual,  but  the  terms  of  its  duality  are  no  longer 
opaque  in  their  inner  nature,  but  are  terms  which  spring 
directly  out  of  consciousness  and  conscious  experience.  If 
we  take  them  in  their  verbal  form  as  inception  and  realiza- 
tion, it  will  be  seen  clearly  how  purpose  becomes  the  natural 
term  of  mediation  leading  from  one  to  the  other.  Lotze, 
who  was  dissatisfied  with  all  forms  of  traditional  idealism 
and  whose  aim  was  to  reach  a  more  realistic  conception, 
found  himself  always  thwarted  in  his  efforts  to  carry  out 
this  aim.  Agreeing  with  the  idealist  that  the  ideal  world 
must  in  some  sense  be  the  prius  of  the  real  world,  his  ques- 
tion was,  What  must  be  supplied  to  the  idea  in  order  that 
it  may  become  real  ?  He  could  not  answer  his  own  ques- 
tion, and  was  forced,  in  order  to  bridge  the  chasm,  to  fall 
back  on  the  conception  of  a  universal  substance  which 
stood  related  to  the  phenomenal  world  in  a  way  almost 
identical    with    Spinoza's    conception    of    the    relation    of 


chap.  ii.  GROUND-PRINCIPLES.  55 

natura  naturans  to  natura  naturata.  In  other  words,  his 
search  for  a  realizing  term  in  his  world  Led  him  virtually 
into  pantheism.  What  Lotze  failed  to  discover  was  the 
volitional  nexus  between  inception  and  realization.  Schop- 
enhauer had  come  upon  the  opposite  form  of  difficulty. 
Starting-  with  the  repudiation  of  idealism  he  sought  to 
construct  a  realistic  doctrine  of  the  world  on  the  notion  of 
abstract  will  or  volitional  striving.  This  striving  which 
is  without  insight  stumbles  accidentally,  or,  we  might  say, 
miraculously,  on  the  idea  in  its  wanderings,  and  thus 
creates  for  itself  a  phenomenal  illusion,  which,  however, 
is  hopelessly  bad  and  gives  rise  to  the  need  of  disillusion- 
ment. Schopenhauer  is  never  able  to  prevent  his  world, 
in  its  efforts  toward  realization,  from  running  into  inevita- 
ble illusion,  and  the  only  way  he  can  see  out  of  the  muddle 
of  existence  is  to  turn  upon  the  source  of  it  all  and  strike 
a  blow  at  the  will  to  live. 

Returning  now  to  the  point  reached  in  the  argument, 
we  have  seen  that  the  two  fundamentally  characterizing 
terms  of  the  metaphysical  world  are  the  concepts  of  incep- 
tion and  realization,  which,  translated  into  substantives, 
become  idea  and  reality.  For  opposite  reasons,  as  we  have 
seen,  Lotze  and  Schopenhauer  failed  to  discover  the  con- 
necting link  between  idea  and  reality.  But  why  should 
any  connecting  link  be  necessary?  Is  not  the  search  as 
futile  as  was  the  hunting  of  the  Snark?  Now  the  search 
itself  will  have  to  settle  the  question  of  futility.  The 
other  question,  that  of  a  need  of  mediation,  cannot  be 
lightly  dismissed.  What  is  there  lacking  of  complete 
reality  in  the  notion  of  inception  or  idea?  From  the 
standpoint  of  finite  processes,  the  distinction  between  the 
idea  and  the  real  is  well  marked  and  fundamental.  The 
thought  of  a  thing  precedes  the  thing  itself,  and  some 
energy  of  causation  or  production  is  involved  in  its  realiza- 
tion. But  it  is  open  to  question  whether  this  distinction  be 
absolute,  and  whether  an  infinite  faculty  of  inception  or 
idea   would    sustain    a    similar   relation   to   the   real.     Let 


56  ANALYSTS.  part  i. 

us  suppose  that  this  distinction  vanishes  in  the  sphere  of  the 
infinite,  what  results  would  logically  follow?  One  result 
would  be  the  identity  of  thought  and  reality,  and,  there- 
fore, the  realization  of  everything  that  should  by  any 
possibility  be  conceived.  Now,  inasmuch  as  it  is  open  to 
a  finite  intelligence  to  conceive  many  hypothetical  opposites 
of  the  ideas  which  it  goes  on  to  realize,  and,  outside  of  this, 
to  inhibit  the  process  of  realization  in  the  case  of  any  given 
thought  or  idea,  can  we  deny  this  same  free  range  of  ideas 
to  the  infinite  without  thereby  imposing  on  it  a  very 
decided  limitation?  That  thought  should  have  free  range 
to  think  that  which  is  not  to  be,  as  well  as  that  which  is 
to  be,  seems  to  be  involved  in  its  very  nature  as  thought. 
Again,  the  presumption  of  the  identity  of  thinking  and 
realizing,  in  carrying  with  it  the  equal  realization  of  every- 
thing conceivable,  seems  to  take  away  that  prerogative  of 
choice  among  ideas  which  gives  a  being  real  power  over 
its  world.  Besides,  there  is  no  analogy  in  experience  for 
the  identification  of  mere  thought  with  reality.  Even  in  the 
ease  of  fictitious  personages  and  creatures  of  imagination, 
the  mental  creature  does  not  become  real  until  it  has  been 
assigned  a  place  in  some  system  which  has  been  made 
objective  by  some  dictum  or  convention  of  will.  Without 
pursuing  the  discussion  further,  we  may  conclude  that 
whether  the  process  be  regarded  as  finite  or  infinite,  the 
distinction  between  inception  or  idea,  and  realization  must 
be  recognized  as  vital  and  thought  must  not  be  robbed  of 
free  agency  with  respect  to  the  realization  of  its  ideas. 

The  question  is  open,  then,  as  to  the  mode  in  which 
that  which  is  conceived  in  idea  may  be  either  inhibited  on 
the  one  hand,  or  else  realized.  If  it  be  inhibited,  what  is  it 
that  inhibits;  and  if  realized,  what  is  the  modus  of  the 
realization  ?  The  answer  to  these  questions  will  lead  to 
the  discovery  of  the  nature  of  the  oversights  of  Lotze  and 
Schopenhauer.  Lotze  overlooked  the  volitional  term,  or  at 
least  failed  to  see  its  necessity  in  order  to  make  his  world- 
scheme  adequate.     If  we  ask  what  more  than  thought  is 


CHAP.  ii.  GROUND-PKINCTPLKS.  57 

needed  to  make  a  world  real,  we  are  led  up  to  the  reply 
that  intention  is  necessary;  intention  which  takes  on  the 
form  of  purpose.  For  it  is  only  when  thought  shapes  itself 
into  purpose  that  it  liberates  the  volitional  energy  which 
lends  to  its  realization.  Now,  will  itself,  when  it  takes 
the  form  of  intention  in  purpose,  has  an  emotional  pre- 
xupposiiion  which  we  call  interest,  and  interest  is  part  of 
the  content  of  the  idea  itself— that  which  gives  it  attract- 
iveness to  the  will— while  the  purpose  or  intention  is  the 
dynamic  outgo  of  the  idea  toward  the  realization  of  the 
attractive  content.  But  this  content  has  been  conceived 
as  content  of  idea  before  it  has  become  realized  content. 
Interest  attaches  to  the  conceived  content,  and  this  leads  to 
its  translation  into  willed  or  intended  content,  and  this 
intention  or  purpose  is  the  spring  of  realization.  Schop- 
enhauer overlooked,  or  rather  denied,  the  ideal  term  of  this 
relation.  His  world  does  not  originate  in  ideal  or  con- 
ceived content,  which,  through  interest,  becomes  an  object 
of  will.  The  first  term  is  that  of  will  itself,  and  it  takes  the 
form,  or  rather  lack  of  form,  of  blind  and  subjective  striv- 
ing which  leads  to  no  rational  outcome.  For,  though  will 
meets  the  idea  somewhere,  the  transaction  takes  place  too 
far  down  the  stream  and  is  of  no  avail. 

The  mediator  which  is  needed  to  connect  the  inceptive 
and  ideal  processes  with  reality  is  the  notion  of  purpose. 
What  is  to  be  real  must  not  only  be  conceived  but  also 
intended.  The  content  of  the  idea  may  fail  of  realization, 
since  it  may  be  inhibited  by  hostile  interest  and  by  the 
intention  not  to  realize.  There  is  doubtless  in  the  world  a 
large  sphere  of  bare  possibilities  which  are  never  realized, 
and  among  these  may  be  found  not  only  suggestions  of  evil 
which  are  positively  inhibited  by  a  hostile  will,  but  also, 
mayhap,  creatures  of  the  divine  imagination  which  fail  of 
entrance  into  the  world  of  reality.  The  open  door  'to 
reality  is  from  idea  to  purpose,  reality  being  the  result  of 
the  purposive  activity.  How,  then,  shall  we  formulate 
the  principle  of  rationality   in  the  metaphysical  sphere? 


58  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

We  have  seen  that  the  fundamental  notion  of  the  meta- 
physical world  is  that  of  idea  and  reality.  The  mediating 
term  which  embodies  the  form  of  motion  in  this  field  and 
also  makes  the  transition  from  content  of  idea  to  content  of 
reality  is  purposive,  and  purpose  is  action  in  the  form  of 
finality,  just  as  natural  causation  is  action  in  the  form  of 
mechanical  determination.  The  principle  of  metaphysical 
reason  may  then  be  stated  as  follows.  The  doctrine  of  the 
world  that  is  to  be  regarded  as  metaphysically  satisfactory 
is  one  which  proceeds  on  the  dual  conception  of  an  ideal 
and  a  real  world,  and  which  connects  the  two  through  the 
mediation  of  purpose  in  such  a  way  that  the  real  world 
is  to  be  regarded  as  the  realization  of  the  ideal  world 
in  which  it  arises  as  merely  conceived  content.  The  con- 
tent of  reality  is  thus  identical  with  ideal  content,  but  it  is 
not  that  idea]  content  unmodified,  nor  is  it  open  to  meta- 
physics to  say  that  there  may  not  be  indefinite  spheres  of 
content  which  remain  ideal  and  have  no  place  in  the  world 
of  reality. 

Making  our  way  step  by  step  through  the  processes 
by  which  natural  science  and  metaphysics  achieve  their 
constructions  of  the  world  of  existence,  we  found  that  the 
concept  of  the  world  under  which  these  constructions  are 
effected  has  passed  through  several  stages  of  transforma- 
tion. We  found  that  mathematics,  dealing  with  presentative 
phenomena  in  space  and  time,  organizes  the  world  of  its  in- 
vestigation under  the  concept  of  whole  and  parts,  and  that 
its  ideal  is  of  an  infinite  whole  within  which  the  mathemat- 
ical processes  have  the  widest  scope.  Entering  the  field  of  the 
physical  sciences  where  natural  causation  reigns  supreme, 
the  scene  changes  and  the  ideal  world  is  conceived  under  the 
notion  of  ground  and  phenomena.  The  idea  of  a  mathemat- 
ical whole  proves  itself  inadequate  to  the  demands  of  phys- 
ics, for  what  it  requires  is  some  guarantee  of  the  uniformity 
and  stability  of  its  phenomena.  This  cannot  be  found  in 
the  phenomena  themselves,  and  hence  the  need  of  substitu- 
ting for  the  notion  of  a  whole  that  is  the  ideal  sum  of  parts, 


CHAP.n.  GKOUND-PKINCIPLES.  59 

that  of  ground-substances  of  which  the  parts  of  the  world 
are  to  be  regarded  as  manifestations.  Also,  the  notion  of 
terms  qualitatively  indifferent  proves  itself  no  longer 
adequate  and  must  be  translated  into  that  of  changes  or 
modifications  in  the  underlying  and  persisting  substances 
which  constitute  the  ground  of  the  world.  When,  finally, 
we  enter  the  metaphysical  preserve  and  essay  an  interpre- 
tation of  the  world  from  the  standpoint  of  its  inner  nature, 
the  notion  of  ground  and  phenomena  is  proved  to  be  no 
longer  adequate.  The  inner  nature  finds  its  type  and  its 
analogies  in  consciousness,  and  especially  in  that  funda- 
mental form  of  consciousness  which  we  call  selfhood.  Now, 
consciousness  as  selfhood  relates  itself  to  a  world  of  realiza- 
tion through  the  mediation  of  its  own  purposive  move- 
ments. For  the  inner  world  which  underlies  these  purposive 
movements  the  notion  of  ground-substances  will  not  be 
adequate.  There  is  required  the  notion  of  something  which 
relates  itself  to  the  purposive  movements  of  the  world 
as  their  true  rational  ground  and  prius,  and  this  want  can 
be  satisfied,  as  we  have  seen,  only  in  the  reduction  of  the 
notion  of  a  ground  of  the  world  to  the  idea  of  a  world 
in  which  a  ground  is  conceived.  The  notion  also  of  phe- 
nomena, that  is,  of  changes  which  are  merely  the  indices  of 
the  thoughtless  impacts  of  substances,  can  no  longer  main- 
tain itself.  For  this  we  must  substitute  the  notion  of  the 
realization,  in  the  forms  of  existence,  of  what  has  already 
been  conceived  in  idea.  The  mediator  of  this  realization 
we  have  found  to  be  purpose,  a  term  which  connects  idea 
with  interest  and  will,  and  through  these  with  realizing 
efficacy. 

Now,  the  three  fundamental  conceptions  which  con- 
sciousness achieves  in  its  successive  efforts  to  construe  the 
world  in  terms  of  knowledge  may  be  taken  to  represenl 
three  successive  rational  categories  of  its  essential  nature. 
in  view  of  this,  as  a  final  consideration,  we  wish  to  ask 
whether  any  permanent  incongruities  or  unresolvable 
antinomies  arise  in  connection  with  these  categories.    There 


GO  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

is  one  presumption  which  would  lead  inevitably  to  such 
results,  and  that  is  the  claim  which  is  liable  to  be  put  forth 
for  the  finality  and  exclusive  validity  of  some  one  of  these 
points  of  view.  The  mathematician  may  claim  for  his 
point  of  view  exclusive  validity  as  against  that  of  natural 
science  which  conceives  a  world  of  substances  and  causal 
activities.  Under  the  concept  of  whole  and  parts  he  may 
seek  either  to  prove  the  notions  of  substance  and  cause  to 
be  illusions,  or  he  may  attempt  to  reduce  them  to  the  strict 
terms  of  the  mathematical  process.  Now,  in  treating  of 
method  in  the  following  chapter  we  shall  attempt  to  show 
how  mathematics  has  a  sphere  of  application  to  physical 
processes.  Here,  however,  the  question  is  a  deeper  one, 
whether  the  basal  notions  of  physics  have  validity  of  their 
own  apart  from  mathematics.  The  answer  to  this  question 
will  be  in  two  parts.  In  the  first  place,  we  find  that  any 
effort  to  reason  away  these  underlying  physical  concepts 
will  prove  itself  to  be  futile.  It  is  by  no  accident  that 
physical  investigation  comes  upon  them,  but  rather,  by 
way  of  a  demand  that  its  own  procedure  shall  be  rational- 
ized and  the  terms  with  which  it  deals  grounded  in  a  stable 
medium.  These  notions  are,  therefore,  as  inevitable  as  the 
movement  of  science  itself.  But,  secondly,  conceding  their 
right  to  exist,  why  should  not  the  concepts  of  physics  be 
in  the  last  analysis  reducible  to  those  of  mathematics? 
This  might  be  possible  if  the  difference  between  them  were 
one  of  degree  only.  But  we  have  seen  that  the  notion  of 
causal  activity  involves  the  presence  of  qualitative  changes 
in  the  substances  which  constitute  the  stable  world.  If 
these  changes  are  not  to  be  regarded  as  illusions  but  as 
significant  facts,  it  follows  that  their  significance  can  be 
secured  only  by  connecting  them  as  qualitative  modifica- 
tions with  the  underlying  substances  of  the  physical  world. 
The  notions  of  cause,  ground  and  phenomenon  are  qualita- 
tively different,  therefore,  from  the  concepts  of  mathe- 
matics,— equivalence,  whole  and  parts. 

Turning  now  to  the  relation  between  the  concepts  of 


ciixVP.  ii.  GROUND  -PRINCIPLES.  01 

physics  and  those  of  metaphysics,  we  enter  here  a  battle 
arena  where  many  a  bitter  conflict  has  been  waged.  That 
there  should  be  anything  bid  antagonism  between  two  such 
concepts  as  those  of  natural  causation  and  purpose  seems 
preposterous.  Natural  causation  distinctively  excludes 
the  notion  of  intention  or  idea  from  its  mode  of  producing 
effects  or  changes,  whereas  this  is  the  distinctive  presump- 
tion of  purposive  activity.  What  is  purposively  achieved 
is  something  that  passes  from  idea  to  reality  through  the 
medium  of  purpose.  What  is  achieved  by  natural  causa- 
tion is  something  that  presupposes  only  an  impact  of  one 
intentionless  substance  upon  another.  What  physics  dis- 
tinctively shuts  out  is  intention  and  prevision.  These 
constitute  the  differentia}  of  purposive  activity.  It  is  clear 
enough,  then,  that  there  can  be  no  question  of  the  reduction 
of  the  concepts  of  physics  to  terms  of  metaphysics,  or  of  the 
terms  of  metaphysics  to  those  of  physics.  There  is  a  dif- 
ference of  kind  which  precludes  such  an  adjustment.  Noth- 
ing can  be  clearer  than  the  fact  that  in  the  three  rational 
conceptions  on  which  mathematics,  physics  and  meta- 
physics rest  we  have  three  notions  which  defy  all  our  efforts 
to  reduce  them  to  terms  of  identity.  The  correlation  of  the 
three  disciplines  must  be  effected,  if  it  is  to  be  achieved 
at  all,  in  some  other  way  than  that  of  showing  the  ultimate 
identity  of  the  conceptions  on  which  they  rest.  It  will  be 
the  business  of  another  chapter  to  consider  the  problem  of 
correlation  in  some  detail.  Here  we  shall  content  ourselves 
with  a  hint  or  two  in  closing  an  already  wearisome  discus- 
sion. While  it  is  impossible  to  reduce  the  concepts  of 
mathematics  and  physics  to  a  basis  of  identity,  this  does  not 
prevent  the  use  of  mathematics  in  physical  investigation. 
The  possibility  of  this  arises  from  two  facts,  which  arc 
perhaps  at  bottom  the  same.  In  the  first  place,  the  sub- 
stances of  the  physical  world  manifest  themselves  in  the 
phenomenal  forms  of  things  and  their  movements  in  space 
and  time,  and  thus  present  an  aspect  of  identity  with  the 
terms  of  the  mathematical.     Mathematics  will  be  applica- 


62  ANALYSIS.  parti. 

ble  to  physics  just  so  far  as  its  world  of  things  and  move- 
ments is  reducible  to  a  plurality  of  parts  which  are  definite 
and  quantitatively  unchangeable.  Or,  to  express  the  same 
thing-  in  different  phrase,  mathematics  will  be  applicable 
to  physical  phenomena  just  so  far  as  these  show  themselves 
capable  of  reduction  to  terms  of  definite  and  stable  equiva- 
lence. The  other  reason  for  the  applicability  of  mathe- 
matics to  physics  is  found  in  what  may  be  called  the 
mechanical  form  of  physical  change.  All  changes  are,  by 
hypothesis,  originated  through  impact,  a  fact  which  opens 
the  way  for  the  entrance  of  exact  treatment.  For  if  we 
assume  that  the  phenomenon  has  a  quantitative  aspect  and 
that  the  exact  force  of  the  impact  is  calculable,  it  will  be 
clearly  possible  to  state  a  law  of  phenomena  by  virtue  of 
which  the  changes  of  these  will  vary  with  the  force  of  the 
impact.  Correlation  will  thus  be  possible  without  sacri- 
ficing differences  that  are  fundamental. 

But  surely  a  more  formidable  obstacle  will  be  encoun- 
tered in  any  attempt  to  correlate  the  concepts  of  physics 
and  metaphysics.  Let  us  not  mistake  here  what  the  effort 
to  correlate  involves.  We  have  already  concluded  that 
there  can  be  no  question  of  the  reduction  of  one  set  of 
conceptions  to  terms  of  identity  with  another  set.  Natural 
causation  and  purpose  can  never  be  the  same.  Nor  can 
idea  and  reality  be  the  same  as  ground  and  phenomena. 
It  is  possible,  however,  that  while  this  is  true,  a  real 
correlation  might  be  effected  from  some  other  point  of 
view.  If,  for  instance,  we  distinguish  between  the  forms 
of  manifestation  and  definition  and  the  content  which 
is  successively  manifested  and  defined  in  the  various  modes 
of  world-interpretation,  it  will  be  possible  to  regard  the 
notions  of  whole  and  parts,  ground  and  phenomena, 
idea  and  reality,  as  successive  modes  of  characterizing  a 
common  world  of  things.  For  if  we  observe  the  distinction 
between  things  and  their  behavior,  with  which  we  started 
out,  mathematics  and  physics  may  be  regarded  as  two 
different  ways,   having  points  in   common,   of   conceiving 


chap.  ii.  GROUND-PKINCU'LHK.  63 

one  world  of  things  from  the  point  of  view  not  of  their 
inner  nature,  but  of  their  outer  conduct.  Mathematics 
and  physics  thus  deal  with  the  one  world  but  under  differ- 
ent concepts  and  presuppositions.  Again,  if  we  place 
natural  science  on  one  side  and  metaphysics  on  the  other 
it  will  be  found  that  natural  science  nowhere  doubts  the 
existence  of  an  inner  nature  of  things  but  only  its  know- 
ability,  and  from  the  standpoint  of  natural  science  the 
validity  of  the  doubt  must  be  conceded.  But  if  we  admit 
the  validity  of  the  metaphysical  point  of  view;  namely,  its 
departure  from  the  inner  nature  itself  and  its  presumption 
that  in  consciousness  we  have  the  type  of  inner  nature  in 
general,  then  the  validity  of  the  doubt  of  natural  science 
ceases  to  exist  for  metaphysics  whose  specific  problem  is  just 
the  question  of  the  inner  meaning  of  the  world.  Let  us 
admit  this,  and  we  then  have  natural  science  and  meta- 
physics defining  a  common  world  of  things  under  two  sets 
of  concepts  and  presuppositions.  Natural  science  defines 
under  concepts  and  presuppositions  which  admit  the  exist- 
ence of  an  inner  nature,  but  directly  handles  only  the  phe- 
nomenal aspects  of  things ;  while  metaphysics,  presupposing 
the  construction  of  natural  science  which  defines  the  world 
from  the  point  of  view  of  its  manifestations,  assumes  as 
its  special  task  the  interpretation  of  the  one  world  which 
gives  itself  the  phenomenal  utterance,  in  terms  of  its  own 
inner  nature.  Metaphysics  thus  seeks  a  construction  which 
will  tell  us  not  simply  what  things  are  in  their  manifesta- 
tion, but  the  inner  meaning  or  intention  which  expresses 
itself  in  this  manifestation.  From  such  a  statement  we 
begin  to  see  how  it  may  be  possible  for  the  one  world  to 
have  in  it  room  and  function  for  two  such  different 
agencies  as  natural  causation  and  purpose.  If  natural 
causation  expresses  the  form  which  the  de  facto  world 
takes  on  in  these  movements  which,  taken  as  a  whole,  con- 
st itute  to  observation  its  outer  behavior,  then  purpose,  as 
we  have  construed  it,  will  express  the  form  its  activity  will 
assume  when  conceived  as  the  utterance  of  the  inner  nature 
of  things. 


CHAPTER  III 


METHODS    IN    PHILOSOPHY. 


The  term  method  suggests  something  dry  and  logical 
and  will  doubtless  frighten  away  all  but  the  elect  who  are 
foreordained  to  be  saved.  But  there  are  two  ways  of  look- 
ing at  method,  one  technical  and  somewhat  dry,  the  other 
more  profound  and  less  technical,  but  also  dry  to  any  one 
who  does  not  find  thinking  interesting.  In  the  technical 
sense,  method  is  a  name  for  an  instrument  of  speculation 
or  research,  and  our  method  in  this  sense  will  be  simply 
our  way  of  ordering  and  testing  our  processes  in  order  to 
reach  results  which  may  be  depended  on.  Deduction  and 
induction  are  names  of  method  in  this  sense  and  our  deduct- 
ive and  inductive  logics,  aside  from  the  psychological 
matter  they  contain,  will  be  found  to  consist  of  elaborate 
directions  for  the  systematic  conduct  of  our  thinking  or 
observing,  together  with  a  conspectus  of  the  false  roads 
which  lead  the  unwary  investigator  astray,  and  a  table  of 
tests  by  means  of  which  the  validity  of  results  may  be 
determined.  It  is  not  our  purpose  here  to  decry  this  tech- 
nical conception  of  method,  for  every  one  who  reasons  or 
investigates  must  have  to  do  with  it.  There  is,  however, 
a  profound er  sense  of  method  to  which  the  deeper  interest 
of  our  inquiry  attaches  because  it  involves  conceptions  not 
only  of  the  modus  but  also  of  the  fundamental  character 
of  the  procedure  to  which  it  applies.  In  this  profounder 
sense  our  method  is  our  way  of  looking  at  and  interpreting 

64 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  65 

the  world.  In  the  preceding  chapter  we  have  distinguished 
between  the  two  ways  of  looking  a1  and  interpreting  things 
which  are  characteristic  of  natural  science  and  metaphysics. 
This  distinction  will  serve  here  as  a  point  of  departure  in 
a  study  of  the  deeper  sense  of  method.  What  are  the 
characteristic  features  of  the  method  of  natural  science  in 
its  construction  of  the  world  .'  We  have  already  seen  thai 
natural  science  is  external  in  its  point  of  view,  observa- 
tional and  descriptive  in  its  procedure  and  phenomenal 
in  its  concept  of  the  kind  of  a  world  it  seeks  to  define. 
What,  then,  have  we  left  to  consider  under  the  head  of 
method  except  its  technical  details?  We  shall  find  that 
a  very  important  consideration  remains.  We  saw  in  a 
preceding  chapter  that  the  external  standpoint  of  natural 
science  with  relation  to  the  object  of  investigation,  involves 
indifference  of  nature  between  the  investigating  conscious- 
ness and  the  things  which  fall  under  observation.  This 
means  a  strict  inhibition  of  the  investigating  consciousness 
from  the  reading  of  its  own  nature  into  the  things  it  is 
studying,  or  from  the  use  of  any  analogy  of  its  own  inner 
activity  as  a  principle  of  definition  in  the  sphere  of  the 
object.  The  result  of  this  inhibition  is  the  virtual  trans- 
lation of  the  things  of  the  phenomenal  world  into  things  in 
themselves,  to  whose  inner  nature  the  observer  has  no  clues 
and  which  he  must  approach,  therefore,  in  a  completely 
external  manner  through  the  study  of  such  portions  of 
their  conduct  as  may  come  within  the  range  of  his  powers. 
The  objective  world  will,  therefore,  constitute  for  him  an 
order  of  phenomena  which  must  be  given  to  him  in  presenta- 
tion and  toward  which  he  must  take  the  attitude  of  one 
who  is  studying  a  system  of  things  wholly  outside  and  alien 
to  himself.  Of  course,  he  may  find  in  the  course  of  his 
study  that  things  reveal  aspects  which  make  them  seem  in  a 
sense  kindred  to  himself.  But  so  long  as  he  remains  true 
to  the  natural  science  point  of  view  he  will  not  let  these 
aspects  alter  his  impartial  attitude  toward  the  world. 
That  world  will  present  itself  to  him  in  an  objective  order 
5 


66  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

to  which  he  will  find  it  necessary  to  accommodate  himself 
in  order  to  discover  its  laws.  The  question  as  to  which 
shall  lay  down  the  law  to  the  other  will  not  arise,  since  it 
will  be  obvious  that  the  objective  order  holds  the  right  of 
way  and  that  the  observer  must  play  the  part  of  a  waiting 
spectator,  it  being  no  part  of  his  business  to  determine 
what  shall  turn  up,  but  only  to  await  and  describe.  We 
meet  the  issue  here  involved  in  the  general  question  as  to 
the  priority  of  mind  or  matter  in  the  physical  world.  It 
is  not  a  question  of  the  relation  of  the  two  orders, 
whether  they  represent  a  parallelism  or  an  interaction. 
The  truth  is,  natural  science  has  no  dealings  with  the  two 
orders  of  phenomena  except  as  an  incident  in  its  procedure 
and  then  it  remorselessly  subordinates  the  mental  to  the 
physical.  The  question  here  is  simply  one  of  attitude,  and 
it  has  been  made  clear  that  in  the  physical  world  the  physi- 
cal and  not  the  mental,  the  non-conscious  and  not  the 
conscious,  claims  the  priority.  The  method  of  natural 
science  is  one,  then,  in  which  the  world  of  things  stands 
out  as  an  objective  order  which  the  investigating  con- 
sciousness must  approach  externally  and  observationally. 

Method  in  metaphysics  in  the  deeper  sense  of  the  term, 
involves  a  complete  revolution  of  the  method  of  natural 
science  corresponding  to  the  change  in  points  of  view. 
Metaphysics,  occupying  as  it  does  the  inner  rather  than  the 
outer  standpoint  and  approaching  the  nature  of  things  by 
means  of  the  analogies  of  consciousness  which  it  takes  to  be 
the  type  of  inner  nature  in  general,  is  thereby  led  to  recall 
the  natural  science  presumption  of  indifference  of  nature 
between  the  investigating  consciousness  and  the  things 
investigated,  and  to  substitute  for  it  the  presumption  of 
kinship  or  community  of  nature. 

This  involves  that  change  of  attitude  toward  things  to 
which  Kant  has  applied  the  famous  phrase  Copernican  revo- 
lution. Historically,  we  have  in  Kant 's  experience  an  inter- 
esting and  deeply  significant  incident.  A  study  of  the 
writings  of  the  pre-critical  period,  together  with  the  aids  de- 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  fi7 

rivable  from  Kant's  letters  and  from  other  sources,  brings  to 
light  the  fact  that  in  the  early  stages  of  this  period  Kant's 
own  point  of  view  was  determined  largely  by  the  natural 
science  of  his  time,  particularly  by  mathematics  and  the 
Newtonian  physics  of  which  he  was  an  enthusiastic  partisan. 
The  study  of  physics  bringing  the  mind  of  Kant  into  the 
attitude  of  a  spectator  of  an  objective  order  of  nature  which 
must  be  approached  through  the  senses,  gradually  under- 
mined the  principle  of  dogmatic  rationalism  in  which  he 
had  been  indoctrinated  and  which  taught  him  to  seek  the 
source  of  the  world-order  in  a  certain  order  of  rational 
conceptions  from  which  the  course  of  the  world  is  to  be 
deduced.  Kant  was  forced  to  choose  between  the  two 
alternatives  of  thinking  out  the  world-order  in  the  light 
of  certain  a  priori  conceptions,  or,  of  approaching  that 
order  objectively  and  determining  its  contents  by  observa- 
tional methods.  The  result  was  that  his  faith  in  dogmatic 
rationalism  was  shaken,  but  as  yet  not  wholly  destroyed. 
The  work  of  destruction  was  completed  by  the  empiricism 
of  Locke  and  Hume.  The  study  of  Locke,  and  particularly 
of  Hume,  brought  Kant  face  to  face  with  a  system  which 
called  in  question  all  his  dogmatic  presuppositions  and  cor- 
roborated the  testimony  of  natural  science  by  claiming  that 
all  our  ideas  must  seek  their  originals  in  the  senses  which 
in  turn  obtain  their  materials  from  without.  In  short,  the 
lesson  which  Kant  learned  from  Locke  and  Hume  was  a 
further  confirmation  of  the  validity  of  the  standpoint  of 
natural  science.  In  the  order  of  sensations  as  well  as  in 
the  objective  order  of  phenomena,  the  world  of  things  held 
the  primacy,  and  consciousness  must  adapt  itself  to  these 
objective  orders  in  order  to  know  them.  Now,  all  this 
seems  obviously  true  from  the  standpoint  of  common  sense, 
and  the  plain  man  might  wrell  ask,  "Why  answerest  thou 
further?"  But  we  have  still  something  to  learn  from 
Kant.  The  effect  of  Locke  and  Hume  on  Kant's  mind  was 
a  total  and  final  breach  with  dogmatic  rationalism.  Kant 
first  became  an  empiricist  and  finally,  under  the  influence 


(38  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

of  Hume,  temporarily  at  least,  a  sceptic,  his  scepticism  aris- 
ing from  the  fact  revealed  by  Hume 's  analysis,  that  empiri- 
cism having  committed  itself  to  an  objective  foundation  is 
brought  to  the  discovery  that  the  order  of  sense  presents  only 
an  illusion  of  objectivity  while  in  fact  it  is  purely  subjective. 
This  discovery  did  not  represent  a  finality,  however,  with 
Kant  as  it  did  with  Hume,  but  rather  induced  the  great  crisis 
of  his  intellectual  development.  Kant  could  not  rest  in  scep- 
ticism, but  what  was  to  be  done?  What  occurred  to  Kant 
was  a  transformation  which  led  him  to  the  standpoint  of 
critical  rationalism.  This  transformation  he  called  a 
Copernican  revolution,  and  the  question  here  is,  What 
was  the  significance  of  this  revolution,  for  Kant's  mental 
history  as  well  as  for  philosophy  itself?  Every  student  of 
history  knows  that  Copernicus  revolutionized  astronomy  by 
bringing  about  a  change  from  a  geo-centric  to  a  helio- 
centric conception  of  the  planetary  system.  To  Coper- 
nicus we  moderns  owe  the  undisputed  primacy  which  we 
ascribe  to  the  sun  in  our  planetary  system.  Now  Kant, 
following  the  analogy  of  Copernicus,  conceives  a  simi- 
lar revolution  in  the  sphere  of  mind.  To  understand 
the  revolution  correctly,  however,  some  knowledge  of 
Kant's  mental  situation  before  it  took  place  is  necessary. 
It  is  to  be  borne  in  mind  that  to  Kant  the  position 
of  dogmatic  rationalism  was  no  longer  tenable.  He  had 
frankly  accepted  the  point  of  view  of  natural  science  and 
he  was  an  empiricist  in  philosophy.  Natural  science  and 
empiricism  had  in  common  their  occupation  of  an  objective 
jjoint  of  view,— their  insistence  on  an  objective  order  to 
which  the  thoughts  of  men  must  adapt  themselves.  And 
the  discovery  that  the  objective  order  of  empiricism  was 
illusive,  while  it  drove  him  for  the  time  into  philosophical 
scepticism,  did  not  cause  him  to  doubt  the  reality  of  the 
objective  order  per  se.  It  was  there  embodied  in  the 
Anschauung  of  natural  science,  and  Kant  was  a  loyal  par- 
tisan of  natural  science  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of 
his  career.     But  he  was  a  borne  metaphysician  also,  and 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  69 

natural  science  did  not  supply  him  with  a  complete  doc- 
trine of  the  world.  A  more  ultimate  interpretation  was 
needed.  And  yet  the  effort  to  develop  this  interpretation 
on  the  basis  of  an  objective  order  of  sensations,  and  by 
means  of  the  ordinary  instruments  of  science,  had  proved 
a  failure  and  had  given  birth  only  to  the  illusion  of  objec- 
tivity while  in  truth  it  was  a  purely  subjective  affair  of 
man's  own  imagining.  The  result  was  a  complete  dualism 
between  the  order  of  natural  science  and  that  of  meta- 
physics with  no  mediator  anywhere  in  sight. 

Two  alternatives  are  open  to  a  thinker  in  Kant's  posi- 
tion. He  may  become  a  philosophical  sceptic  and  hold  the 
objective  order  of  natural  science  to  be  final;  or,  he  may 
look  for  a  deeper  insight  which  will  enable  him  to  remain 
loyal  to  the  objective  order  of  science  without  sacrificing 
his  metaphysical  faith.  This  latter  was  the  course  fol- 
lowed by  Kant.  His  search  led  him  to  the  position  of  his 
later  philosophy  and  the  insight  which  came  to  him  was 
in  substance  as  follows.  He  saw  that  the  security  of 
natural  science  in  its  objective  order  arises  from  its  accept- 
ance of  that  order  without  question  as  to  whether  it  can 
be  taken  as  final  or  not.  Kant's  reflection  on  things  led  him 
to  a  distinction  which  may  have  been  suggested  by  that  of 
Locke  between  the  primary  and  secondary  qualities  of 
matter.  I  refer  to  his  distinction  between  the  form  and 
matter  of  things.  Only  in  the  matter  could  Kant  find  a 
direct  reference  to  anything  extra-mental,  and  this  refer- 
ence led  him  to  assert  a  system  of  things-in-themselves 
lying  outside  of  the  limits  of  experience.  The  forms  of 
things  are  those  aspects  of  them  which  are  essential  to  their 
existence  as  things ;  and  with  reference  to  the  world  of 
things,  those  aspects  which  characterize  it  as  a  whole  and  on 
the  basis  of  which  it  can  be  reduced  to  the  terms  of  rational 
knowledge.  Avoiding  details,  it  may  be  said  that  Kant's 
analysis  led  him  to  select  out  as  constituting  the  forms  of 
the  world  of  presentation,  space,  time,  and,  as  derived  from 
them,   quantity.     While   in   the   sphere   of   understanding 


70  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

where  the  world  of  presentation  becomes  further  reflected, 
a  group  of  forms  emerge,  central  and  typical  among  which 
stands  that  of  natural  causation.  But  space,  time,  quan- 
tity and  causation  are  just  those  aspects  which  are  most 
fundamental  to  the  objective  order  of  natural  science.  "We 
have  seen  that  its  whole  procedure  rests  on  these,  and  that 
without  them  it  is  not  possible  to  conceive  the  existence  of 
any  order  of  things  or  events.  They  are,  then,  the  funda- 
mentals of  the  very  world  with  which  science  so  con- 
fidently deals.  What,  then,  is  Kant's  conclusion  about 
these  world-forms?  Simply  this,  that  when  we  carry  our 
analysis  deep  enough  we  find  that  those  very  forms  which 
supply  true  objectivity  to  the  world  of  natural  science  are 
functions  of  a  'primal  activity  of  mind  in  its  first  relation  to 
tilings.  There  is  a  primal  mental  activity  that  generates 
those  form-giving  and  organizing  concepts  which  render 
the  appearance  of  any  orderly  and  coherent  world  in  the 
field  of  experience  possible. 

It  was  in  this  discovery  that  Kant  achieved  his  Coper- 
nican  revolution.  Just  as  the  senses  in  astronomy  produce 
the  illusion  of  sun  and  planets  revolving  around  a  station- 
ary earth,  so  in  metaphysics  the  senses  give  rise  to  a 
similar  illusion  of  a  purely  extra-mental  order  of  things 
to  which,  as  stationary,  our  thoughts  must  completely 
adapt  themselves.  The  illusion  in  astronomy  was  cured  by 
an  appeal  to  the  less  obvious  but  more  certain.  And  Kant 
seeks  to  cure  the  metaphysical  illusion  by  a  corresponding 
appeal  from  the  obvious  to  the  rationally  necessary. 
Though  it  seems  obvious  that  the  real  order  of  the  world 
is  extra-mental,  and  the  plain  man  would  be  scandalized  by 
the  denial  of  the  obvious,  yet  analysis  makes  this  denial 
necessary.  The  real  order  of  the  world,  while  truly  objec- 
tive, is  not  wholly  extra-mental,  but  mind  has  supplied  to 
it  the  essential  features  of  its  objectivity.  The  result  of 
the  discovery  for  Kant  was  a  change  from  what  we  may 
call  a  hylo-centric  to  a  psycho-centric  conception  of  the 
world  of  reality.     The  mind  is  no  longer  the  mere  spec- 


citap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  71 

tutor  of  a  system  that  is  ultra  and  alien  to  it.  but  it  finds 
the  const  it  ut  ion  of  the  system  to  be  akin  to  itself:  to  be, 
in  fact,  the  creature  of  primal  mental  activity.  And  it 
is  on  this  fact  that  the  faith  of  science  in  its  world,  is 
lound,  in  the  last  analysis,  to  rest. 

Now  we  are  not  holding  a  brief  for  Kant  and  the  sole 
motive  of  this  elaborate  study  of  the  Kantian  revolution 
is  its  vast  significance  for  philosophy.  Kant  did  not  carry 
his  revolution  far  enough  to  reach  absolutely  satisfactory 
results.  The  real  significance  of  the  revolution  lies  in  its 
demonstration  of  the  fact  that  the  only  tenable  stand- 
point for  metaphysics  is  that  of  consciousness  itself  in 
its  effort  to  realize  the  world.  In  this  effort  conscious- 
ness or  mind  holds  the  primacy  and  supplies  the  basal 
conceptions  under  which  the  real  is  to  be  organized 
and  defined.  Kant's  insight  had  exhausted  itself  before 
it  reached  a  point  of  final  analysis  where  all  this  would 
have  become  clear.  Let  us  suppose,  then,  that  the  Kantian 
vision  had  been  large  enough  for  the  whole  demand, — To 
what  conclusion  would  it  have  led?  In  order  to  answer 
this  question  it  will  be  necessary  to  refer  again  to  the 
history  of  Kant's  pre-critical  period.  The  evolution  of  the 
critical  point  of  view  covers  two  periods  in  Kant's  history. 
The  first  lying  between  1766  and  1771,  the  latter  being  the 
date  of  his  inaugural  on  the  Principles  of  the  Sensible  and 
Intelligible  Worlds.  In  this  address  Kant  shows  that  his 
critical  doctrine  has  been  practically  completed  in  its  appli- 
cation to  the  sensible  world  in  space  and  time,  but  that  the 
idea  of  the  categories  has  not  as  yet  been  discovered.  The 
discovery  and  development  of  the  doctrine  of  the  cate- 
gories occupies  Kant  from  1772  to  1781,  the  date  of  the 
appearance  of  the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason.  Now  Kant 
characterizes  the  two  parts  of  his  theory  embodied  in  the 
Aesthetic  and  Analytic  of  that  work,  as  the  doctrines  of 
pi  rception  and  conception,  and  he  conceives  the  whole 
aim  of  his  effort  to  be  the  working  out  of  a  true  synthesis 
between  perceptions  and  conceptions ;  or,  to  be  more  exact, 


72  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

between  the  formal  and  empirical  factors  in  the  content  of 
perceptions  and  conceptions.  The  student  of  Kant  finds 
three  parts  in  his  Critique  corresponding  to  the  three 
functions  perception,  conception,  and  idea,  the  latter 
si  a  nding  for  the  three  ultimate  conceptions  involved  in  the 
interpretation  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  And  while  it  is 
Found  to  be  true  that  Kant  obtained  a  fresh  insight  as  a 
basis  for  his  successive  constructions  in  the  fields  of  per- 
ception and  conception,  there  is  no  record  or  other  evi- 
dence of  any  fresh  insight  as  the  ground  of  his  treatment 
of  the  three  ideas  of  reason.  It  is  here,  then,  I  think,  that 
we  are  to  look  for  the  fundamental  weakness  of  Kantism, 
in  its  failure  of  insight  in  dealing  with  the  three  ultimate 
ideas  of  reason.  Bearing  in  mind  that  what  Kant  sought 
in  each  field  was  the  deduction  and  synthesis  of  formal 
and  empirical  elements,  and  that  the  formal  elements, 
while  real  in  synthesis  with  the  empirical,  are,  apart 
from  them,  abstractions  of  thinking,  let  us  suppose  that 
Kant  had  entered  the  territory  of  these  ideas  pursuant  of 
the  aim  which  animated  him  in  his  other  investigations. 
Assuming  that  his  insight  were  commensurate  with  the 
problem,  what  would  we  expect  him  to  find  out  about 
this  territory?  If  we  would  answer  this  question  intelli- 
gently we  must  first  consider  the  nature  of  his  finds  in  the 
other  two  fields.  It  is  only  in  perception  that  form  comes 
into  immediate  relation  with  sensation,  as  space  and  time. 
The  doctrine  is  that  space  and  time  are  real  as  forms  of  the 
sensible  world ;  that  their  function  in  relation  to  this  world 
is  to  supply  organization  and  objectivity;  that  without 
them  it  would  be  without  form  and  void.  Passing  into 
the  field  of  conceptions  Ave  enter  the  world  of  the  cate- 
gories or  the  sphere  in  which  the  world  is  apprehended 
through  certain  fundamental  concepts.  Now,  what  will 
appear  here  to  careful  reflection  is  the  fact  that  while  the 
two  factors  of  a  concrete  world  are  present  here  as  they 
were  in  the  field  of  perception,  yet  neither  is  identically  the 
same.     The  forms  in  perception  are  what  Kant  calls  pure 


CHAP.m.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  73 

perceptions;  that  is,  pure  intuitions,  while  the  empirical 
elements  are  unorganized  sensations.  Here,  however,  the 
forms  are  terms  of  thinking;  pure  conceptual  intuitions, 
if  you  will,  while  the  empirical  elements  are  no  longer 
unorganized  sensations,  but  the  organized  world  of  per- 
ception. There  is  an  advance  in  organization,  and  the 
empirical  term  in  the  synthesis  is  always  simply  the 
organized  result  of  the  preceding  stage  of  activity.  Had 
Kant  kept  this  in  mind  when  he  came  to  deal  with  the 
ultimate  terms  of  world-organization  which  he  found  in  the 
three  ideas  of  reason,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  he 
would  have  come  into  possession  of  an  important  insight. 
Kant's  difficulty  regarding  those  ideas  was,  as  we  know, 
the  absence  from  the  field  of  ideal  activity  of  any  em- 
pirical term  for  the  constitution  of  a  real  synthesis. 
Let  us  ask,  however,  where  Kant  found  the  empirical  term 
for  his  synthesis  in  the  sphere  of  causation.  Not  in 
unorganized  sensations,  but  in  the  organized  world  of  space 
and  time.  Given  this  world  of  things  and  events  in  space 
and  time,  consciousness  brings  forth  from  its  treasures  the 
category  of  causality  and  requires  that  the  world  shall  be 
further  organized  under  the  principle  of  the  conditional  de- 
pendence of  its  parts.  And  thus  the  world  of  natural  science 
arises.  Entering  the  field  of  the  ideas  of  reason  we 
are  struck  with  their  great  similarity.  They  are  sub- 
stantially all  principles  of  unification  though  applied  to 
different  phases  of  the  real.  Disregarding  this  for  the 
moment,  let  us  ask  why  it  is  that  Kant  is  unable  to  discover 
any  empirical  content  for  these  forms.  It  is  because  he 
is  unable  to  apply  them  directly  to  the  world  of  sense. 
The  world  of  sense  is  finitely  limited  and  its  analogies 
restrict  it  to  a  certain  type  of  object  which  alone  it  can 
regard  as  real.  An  object  of  sense  is  one  that  appears  and 
takes  its  place  as  a  phenomenon  in  space  and  time.  But  what 
about  the  causal  world  of  natural  science;  can  it,  appear 
as  a  phenomenon  in  space  and  time?  It  is  true  that  the 
causal  world  has  a  connection  with  the  world  of  space  and 


74  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

time  and  Kant  has  something  to  say  on  that  topic.  But 
in  the  causal  world  the  presented  term  is  always  a  symbol 
of  some  deeper  relation  or  reality,  and  the  world  of  cause  in 
its  first  person  does  not  show  in  the  order  of  appearances. 
Nevertheless,  the  causal  world  is  a  real  world  which  has  its 
place  in  a  system  of  experience.  Now,  it  is  this  causal 
world,  this  system  of  dynamic  relations  symbolized  but  not 
presented  in  the  world  of  space  and  time,  that  constitutes 
the  empirical  term  in  the  higher  field  of  the  rational  ideas. 
In  view  of  this  empirical  world  which  is  simply  the  world 
of  natural  science,  the  problem  of  reason  is  simple  enough. 
If  we  follow  Kant  and  recognize  three  ultimate  ideas,  there 
will  emerge  three  distinctly  metaphysical  problems.  Let 
us  take  for  our  point  of  departure  the  ground-concept  of 
natural  science,— that  of  the  world  as  a  system  of  grounds 
and  phenomena,— the  three  ideas  of  the  Kantian  meta- 
physics would  be  related  to  it  as  follows.  Viewing  the 
world  on  its  phenomenal  side  it  presents  itself  in  two  sys- 
tems of  qualitatively  different  terms  which  we  may  name 
respectively  nature  and  the  world  of  consciousness.  The 
metaphysical  investigation  of  the  world  of  consciousness 
Kant  names  rational  psychology,  while  to  the  correspond- 
ing investigation  of  nature  he  applies  the  phrase  rational 
cosmology.  Again,  viewing  the  world  from  the  standpoint 
of  its  grounds,  we  arrive  at  the  last  problem  of  meta- 
physics, that  of  the  ultimate  nature  of  reality.  Taking 
these  three  problems  in  order  and  bearing  in  mind  that  the 
ultimate  aim  of  Kant's  endeavor,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  method  at  least,  is  the  completion  of  the  Coperniean 
revolution,  what  we  are  to  seek  here  is  a  characteristic 
treatment  of  the  rational  idea  of  nature  in  connection 
with  the  world  of  natural  science.  The  dominating  cate- 
gory of  natural  science  is  that  of  natiiral  causation,  and  the 
metaphysical  question  would,  of  course,  be,  whether  this 
category  can  be  regarded  as  final  or  whether  we  are  to  look 
for  some  more  ultimate  conception.  The  answer  would 
seem  to  be  that  while  natural  causation  adequately  enough 


chap.  m.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  75 

expresses  the  fact  of  interdependence  of  parts  in  a  world 
of  phenomena,  it  does  not  supply  any  rational  justification 
of  that  fact.  To  constitute  a  rational  justification  it  would 
be  necessary  to  bring  to  light  some  ground  of  prevision  or 
intention  in  which  it  would  appear  that  the  interconnec- 
tion of  the  parts  of  the  world  is  not  the  result  of  mere 
accident  or  blind  fate.  The  only  way  by  which  natural  causa- 
tion itself  can  be  rationally  justified  is  through  connecting 
it  with  some  ground  or  principle  of  prevision  in  relation 
to  which  it  would  stand  as  part  of  the  real  meaning  of  the 
world.  The  application  of  the  cosmological  idea  to  the 
sphere  of  natural  science  would,  therefore,  have  the  effect 
of  translating  it  into  a  system  whose  phenomena  are,  in  the 
last  analysis,  connected  with  previsional  grounds.  Only 
thus  would  it  become  a  completely  rational  world. 

Coming  next  to  the  world  of  consciousness  we  may  ask 
what  form  the  metaphysical  problem  would  assume  here. 
To  answer,  it  would  be  necessary  to  ask  a  preliminary 
question:  How  does  natural  science  view  this  same  world? 
We  must  bear  in  mind  that  the  notion  of  cause  is  funda- 
mental to  natural  science;  that  this  will  be  true  whether 
it  investigates  consciousness  directly,  or  indirectly  on  the 
basis  of  the  psycho-physical  parallelism.  In  the  direct 
investigation  its  aim  will  be  to  discover  the  movements 
of  consciousness  in  order  to  connect  them  with  physical 
grounds  and  conditions  in  the  light  of  which  alone  it  will 
conceive  them  to  be  explained.  The  indirect  investigal  ion 
is,  however,  the  ideal  of  natural  science  in  this  field. 
Its  basis  is  an  assumed  parallelism  between  the  mental 
and  the  physical  in  which  the  mental  is  conceived  to  be 
everywhere  definable  in  terms  of  its  physical  parallel  or 
correspondent.  The  natural  science  of  consciousness, 
therefore,  proceeds  on  the  presumption  of  the  subordina- 
tion of  the  mental  to  the  physical.  But  from  the  stand- 
point of  consciousness  itself  the  physical  is  subordinate 
to  the  mental.  It  is  only  necessary  for  the  Kantian  here 
to  assert  the  Copernican  revolution,  and  that  deeper  point 


76  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

of  view  which  we  call  metaphysical  will  be  achieved. 
Dealing  with  the  same  world  of  consciousness  which  natural 
science  correlates  with  the  physical  world  by  means  of  its 
principle  of  natural  causation,  the  metaphysician  is  able 
to  find  in  consciousness  itself  a  point  of  view  from  which 
the  order  of  subordination  is  reversed.  It  is  the  nature  of 
consciousness  to  assert  its  primacy  in  a  world  where  every- 
thing must  be  known  and  realized  either  in  or  on  its  own 
terms. 

Let  us  ask,  then,  how  this  change  of  standpoint  trans- 
forms the  world  of  consciousness  and  how  it  affects  the 
question  of  its  reality.  In  the  first  place,  it  is  clear  that 
a  great  transformation  will  have  taken  place.  From  the 
observational  standpoint  outside  of  consciousness  the  world 
of  consciousness  presents  the  ordinary  appearance  of  a 
mass  of  phenomena  to  be  studied  and  generalized.  There 
is  no  part  of  consciousness  which  will  have  precedence  over 
any  other  part,  and  all  phenomena  will  be  presumed  to 
possess  equal  value  for  science.  When  we  take  the  inner 
standpoint  of  consciousness  itself  between  a  knowing  self 
and  a  world  of  objectivity  which  it  seeks  to  know  and 
realize,  the  self  becomes  the  point  of  departure  for  knowing 
and  realizing,  and  the  question  arises  as  to  the  reality  of 
this  self.  What  do  we  mean  by  reality  ?  Anything  that  is 
essential  to  the  existence  of  a  system,  the  vanishment  of 
which  would  carry  with  it  the  disappearance  of  the  system, 
must  be  real  so  far  as  that  system  is  concerned.  Now, 
there  is  no  question  of  the  reality  of  the  world  of  con- 
sciousness as  a  mass  of  conscious  facts.  The  only  question 
is  one  that  concerns  the  reality  of  what  we  call  self  in  this 
mass  of  consciousness.  And  it  is  not  the  fact  of  the  self 
that  is  questioned,  nor,  when  we  come  down  to  the  bottom 
issue,  does  the  doubt  attach  to  the  reality  of  some  self. 
There  are  few,  we  presume,  who  would  reject  the  notion 
of  self  as  an  illusion.  Kant  at  least  does  not.  His  doubt 
attaches  to  the  self  of  consciousness  and  in  consciousness, 
which  wTe  know.     This  self  is  only  a  phenomenon  and  not 


chap.  iii.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  77 

real.  The  real  self  is  transcendent  and  different  from  the 
self  in  consciousness.  Kant  thinks  that  because  the  self  in 
consciousness  is  resolvable  into  acts  of  self-consciousness 
it  is  not  therefore  the  real  self.  But  what  does  he  expect? 
The  resolvability  of  self  into  acts  of  self -consciousness  only 
proves  that  the  substance  of  self  is  conscious.  What  else 
should  it  be?  If  it  be  objected  that  the  resolvability  of 
self  into  acts  of  self-consciousness  makes  away  with  per- 
manence, we  may  ask  what  is  meant  by  permanence.  If 
it  means  the  ability  of  the  /  to  carry  itself  through  changes 
in  consciousness  so  that  in  the  series  a,  b .  . .  .  n,  the  I  of  n 
will  be  able,  through  memory  and  association,  to  reinstate 

itself  as  the  I  of  the  group  a,  b n;  then  we  have  the 

whole  transaction  which  we  name  permanence  taking  place 
in  consciousness.  If  permanence  in  the  conscious  world 
does  not  mean  this,  can  any  one  tell  what  it  does  mean? 
The  difficulty  arises  in  the  assumption  that  discreteness 
and  permanence  are  inconsistent,  whereas  the  ordinal  and 
cardinal  processes  of  number  supply  an  example  to  the 
contrary.  Taking  the  ordinal  process  by  itself  and  apply- 
ing it  to  things,  the  world  seems  to  resolve  itself  into  a 
multitude  of  discrete  parts.  There  is  a  solution  of  con- 
tinuity just  as  when  the  self  is  found  to  be  resolvable  into 
acts  of  self-consciousness.  But  the  cardinal  process  restores 
the  continuity  in  its  successive  acts  of  grouping,  each  of 
which  represents  not  simply  a  moment  in  the  series,  but  also 
a  summation  of  all  that  has  gone  before.  The  cardinal 
process  thus  accomplishes  what  is  done  by  memory  and 
association  for  the  self.  There  is  no  reason  why  that  which 
is  discrete  in  its  moments  should  not  be  permanent,  and  if 
this  be  admitted  there  is  no  reason  for  denying  the  reality 
of  the  self  in  consciousness. 

It  was  open  to  Kant,  then,  to  accept  the  self  in  con- 
sciousness as  the  real  self.  Had  he  done  so  the  way  would 
have  been  open  for  a  complete  realization  of  the  Coper- 
nican  revolution.  For  the  reality  of  self  in  consciousness 
stands  as  a  guarantee  of  the  reality  of  the  world  of  which 


78  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

self  is  the  center,  and  just  as  in  cosmology  the  revo- 
lution enabled  us  to  ground  natural  causation  in  an  under- 
lying intention  which  gives  it  meaning,  so  here  in  psychology 
the  revolution  makes  it  possible  to  still  further  rationalize 
the  foundations  of  the  world.  If  the  self  be  the  real  center 
of  the  conscious  world  and  consciousness  claims  primacy 
in  its  relation  to  the  material  and  physical,  then  we  have 
our  world  ultimately  centered  in  selfhood.  And  it  would 
follow  from  this  that  the  activity  of  the  world  will,  in  the 
last  analysis,  take  on  the  form  of  the  activity  of  a  self. 
Now,  the  activity  of  self  is  one  of  realization,  and  realiza- 
tion as  we  have  seen  is  related  to  its  idea  through  the 
volitional  category  of  purpose.  The  psychological  world 
will  thus  be  conceived  as  a  self -centered  sphere  which  re- 
solves itself  into  a  succession  of  acts  of  self -consciousness 
having  the  realization  of  some  idea-purpose  or  purposes  as 
their  aim.  The  whole  activity  of  the  world  resolves  itself 
into  this  form.  The  question  remains,  then,  as  to  the  terms 
of  the  synthesis.  We  have  seen  how  Kant  finds  the  em- 
pirical factor  transformed  in  his  successive  synthesis.  On 
the  supposition  that  the  rational  term  of  the  synthesis  has 
been  achieved  in  the  notion  of  idea-purposes  working  out 
in  forms  of  realization,  where  shall  we  look  for  its  nexus 
with  the  empirical  world?  The  answer  is  not  far  to 
seek.  The  result  of  the  cosmological  synthesis  was  the 
grounding  of  the  sphere  of  natural  causation  in  some 
kind  of  prevision  in  view  of  which  it  becomes  part  of 
the  meaning  of  the  world.  The  empirical  term  here  will  be 
this  world  of  natural  causation  thus  partially  grounded, 
while  the  rational  conception  will  enable  us  to  complete  the 
grounding  by  substituting  for  the  notion  of  prevision,  that 
of  idea-purpose  going  out  into  forms  of  realization  and 
fulfillment.  If  Kant  could  have  seen  his  way  clear  to  the 
assertion  of  the  self  of  experience  as  the  real  self,  he  would 
have  had  grounds  for  asserting  the  reality  of  the  cate- 
gories of  idea-purpose  and  fulfillment.  And  could  he  have 
realized  clearly  that  the  empirical  term  in  all  the  succeed- 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  79 

ing  acts  of  his  synthesis  is  just  the  concrete  result  of  the 
preceding  synthesis,  he  would  have  been  in  a  position  to 
see  also  that  in  translating  the  world  of  natural  causation 
into  a  world  whose  final  meanings  are  to  be  expressed  in 
terms  of  idea-purpose  and  realization,  he  was  not  departing 
from  reality  but  giving  it  a  more  adequate  expression. 

The  final  problem  which  Kant  considered  in  the  section 
on  rational  theology  is  simply  that  of  the  ultimate  nature 
of  reality.  His  reasoning  is  that  our  reflection  leads  us 
by  a  process  of  necessary  thinking  to  the  thought  or  idea 
of  God  as  the  necessary  complement  of  all  existence  and, 
therefore,  as  absolute  being.  We  are  not  concerned  here, 
however,  with  the  way  Kant  reaches  the  idea  of  God,  but 
rather  with  the  fact  that  he  does  reach  it  and  that  he  con- 
siders it  essential  to  the  highest  rational  interpretation  of 
the  world.  To  Kant  the  principle  of  supreme  rationality 
requires  that  the  world,  and  in  fact  the  sum  of  all  existence, 
shall  be  grounded  and  completed  in  an  absolute  being 
whom  we  call  God.  Now  in  reaching  this  conclusion  Kant 
was  but  obeying  the  demand  that  the  world  be  reducible 
to  some  ultimate  form  of  being.  This  demand  will  be  met 
differently  by  thinkers  who  hold  different  views  as  to 
whether  matter  or  mind  are  to  have  the  right  of  way  in  the 
universe.  If  matter  be  given  the  primacy,  some  form  of 
materialism  will  be  the  result.  If  the  primacy  be  given  to 
mind,  then  some  form  of  mentalism  will  emerge.  Kant  ism 
is  anti-materialistic  since  its  Copernican  revolution  has 
secured  the  world-primacy  for  mind.  If  mind  be  primate 
in  the  world  then  the  ultimate  being  of  the  world  will  be 
a  mental  rather  than  a  material  constitution.  Kant  is 
carrying  out  the  terms  of  the  revolution  when  he  makes 
God  the  fundamental  being  of  the  world.  Why,  then,  does 
he  fail  to  assert  the  reality  of  this  God-determined  world? 
The  answer  will  involve  two  leading  considerations.  In 
the  first  place,  Kant  conceives  God's  relation  to  the  world 
to  be  analogous  to  that  of  the  soul's  relation  to  conscious- 
ness.    The   real  self  he  regarded  as  transcendent  in  the 


80  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

sense  of  standing  aloof  from  consciousness  and  being  differ- 
ent in  its  nature  from  the  self  in  consciousness.  The  self 
in  consciousness  is  a  kind  of  vice-gerent  idea  clothed  with 
authority  but  having  no  reality.  In  like  manner  the  real 
God,  if  he  exists,  stands  aloof  from  the  world-sphere  and 
has  a  nature  different  from  that  of  any  being  which  we 
may  form  in  our  conceptions.  The  idea  of  God  is  a  vice- 
gerent term  in  experience,  to  which  authority  is  delegated 
but  which  possesses  no  reality.  We  have  then  a  hypo- 
thetically  real  but  completely  transcendent  deity  related 
to  a  real  idea  of  God  in  experience.  That  is  the  internal, 
immanent  term  of  Kant's  theism.  Kant  was  logically 
justifiable  in  view  of  these  conceptions,  in  asserting  that 
while  it  is  necessary  to  ground  the  world  in  the  idea  of 
God  in  order  that  it  may  be  completely  rational,  yet  we 
are  cut  off  from  concluding  from  it  that  God  is  a  real 
being.  The  real  being  is  hypothetical  and  completely 
transcendent,  and  cannot  be  brought  into  intelligible  rela- 
tions with  the  world  of  experience. 

Let  us  apply  here  the  kind  of  criticism  we  had  recourse 
to  in  dealing  with  the  problem  of  rational  psychology. 
We  do  not  know  God  directly,  but  inferentially  if  at  all. 
This  will  be  a  point  of  difference  between  the  knowledge  of 
self  and  the  knowledge  of  God.  The  self  of  experience,  if 
we  distinguish  it  from  a  hypothetical,  self  beyond  expe- 
rience, is  known  directly.  If,  now,  we  dissociate  the  idea 
of  God  from  that  of  some  hypothetical  being  outside  of  the 
world  of  experience  and  alien  to  it  in  its  nature,  and  asso- 
ciate it  with  a  being  inside  of  experience  and,  therefore, 
presumably  not  alien  to  its  analogies,  a  situation  will  be 
created  which  will  doubtless  lead  to  results  different  from 
those  that  Kant  actually  reached.  The  question  may  well 
be  put,  why  the  idea  of  God  which  necessarily  develops  in 
experience  should  be  denied  all  reference  to  reality,  where- 
as the  demands  of  reality  are  left  to  be  satisfied  by  a  hypo- 
thetical being  that  differs  in  an  unknowable  way  from  the 
being  of  our  idea,     In  the  first  place,  what  is  the  motive 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PIIILOSOP.il  V.  SI 

for  denying  reality  to  the  being  conceived  in  the  idea? 
No  doubt  it  is  feared  that  a  God  within  experience,  and 
by  that  I  mean  within  a  possible  experience,  would  be 
merged  in  the  experience-processes  themselves  and  would 
have  no  distinct  existence.  That  would  be  naturalism  in 
the  field  of  experience.  And  this  fear  of  naturalism  leads 
to  the  hypothesis  of  a  purely  transcendent  being.  But 
why  should  a  purely  transcendent  being  be  regarded  as  real 
at  all?  No  intelligible  reason  can  be  given.  For  aught  we 
can  know  to  the  contrary  a  purely  transcendent  deity  is 
simply  the  unreal  object  of  an  abstraction.  The  idea  of 
God  which  Kant  finds  necessary  to  his  world  is  the  idea  of 
God  in  experience.  Why,  then,  should  not  the  real  being 
of  God  be  ascribed  to  the  being  conceived  in  this  idea? 
We  do  not  know  such  a  being  directly  as  we  know  self. 
But  why  should  we  stand  aloof  from  inferential  knowl- 
edge? What  is  it  to  know  inf  erentially  ?  We  know  the 
north  pole  only  inf  erentially :  that  is,  we  know  it  to  be  neces- 
sarily in  the  region  to  which  it  is  assigned,  although  no  one 
has  ever  been  there  to  see  it,  simply  because  it  is  necessary 
to  complete  the  system  of  our  planet  and  to  explain  the 
existence  of  phenomena  which  we  know  to  exist,  but  which 
require  the  existence  of  a  north  pole  for  their  justification. 
In  like  manner  we  would  know  God  inferentially  if  the 
conception  of  him  were  found  necessary  to  the  rational 
completion  of  the  world  and  for  the  justification  of  fea- 
tures of  existence  which  would  be  otherwise  inexplicable. 
In  short,  the  necessity  which  Kant  ascribes  to  the  idea  of 
God  is  of  the  species  of  inferential  knowledge. 

The  aim  here  is  not  to  argue  the  general  question 
whether  an  inferential  knowledge  of  God  be  possible,  but 
rather  whether  Kant's  claims  for  the  idea  of  God  do  not 
amount  to  inferential  knowledge  of  his  being.  It  is  here 
contended  that  they  do,  and  that  it  is  legitimate  in  view 
of  that  fact  to  connect  that  inferential  knowledge,  not  with 
a  hypothetical  transcendent  being  about  which  we  can 
form  no  intelligible  conceptions,  but  rather  with  a  being 
6 


82  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

within  the  scope  of  experimental  analogies,  to  whom  our 
idea,  developed  in  the  processes  of  our  experience,  has  an 
intelligible  applieation.  Should  any  one  who  follows  us 
up  to  this  point  be  troubled  still  lest  God  be  lost  or 
identified  with  the  world  of  experience,  we  have  only  to 
ask  in  reply  how  could  he  be  so  lost  or  identified?  The 
idea  of  God  which  Ave  form  is  not  the  idea  of  anything 
else,  and  hence  our  knowledge  of  God  is  not  knowledge  of 
anything  else.  We  do  not  fear  the  merging  of  the  north 
pole  with  anything  else  in  onr  world  of  experience.  It  is 
clear  that  so  far  as  the  question  of  knowledge  is  concerned 
no  difficulty  can  arise.  But  still,  as  a  question  of  being, 
there  may  be  some  difficulty.  If  we  say  that  the  God  of 
experience  is  real,  do  we  not  identify  the  substance  of  the 
divine  nature  with  the  substance  of  experience?  What, 
then,  is  the  substance  of  experience?  We  answer,  con- 
sciousness, and  we  have  seen  that  the  essential  form  of 
reality  in  consciousness  is  that  of  selfhood.  To  identify 
the  divine  substance  with  the  substance  of  experience, 
means  only  the  conclusion  that  God  is  a  conscious  being 
and  that  the  basal  category  of  his  nature  is  selfhood.  In 
short,  the  assertion  of  a  real  divine  being  in  the  world  of 
experience  is  just  the  assertion  of  a  divine  self  in  that 
world.  This  would  be  the  conclusion  of  Kantism  were  its 
faith  to  be  transferred  from  a  doctrine  of  ultra-experi- 
ential reality  to  one  that  is  intra-experiential  and  that 
conceives  the  content  of  experience,  actual  or  possible,  as 
being  the  content  of  the  real. 

Had  Kant  reached  this  result  he  would  have  been  in  a 
position  to  make  his  Copernican  revolution  complete;  for, 
being  no  longer  hampered  with  an  ideal  world  that  would 
not  fit  into  the  system  of  reality,  thus  forcing  dualism  be- 
tween the  ideal  and  the  real,  he  could  have  closed  the  chasm 
and  reached  the  conception  of  one  sphere  of  reality.  In  this 
last  step  of  his  synthetic  effort  the  divine  idea  embodying 
our  knowledge  of  the  divine  being  of  the  world  of  expe- 
rience would  have  possessed  more  than  regulative  value  in 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  83 

determining  our  thoughts  about  the  world:  it  would  have 

possessed  constitutive  value,  to  use  terms  of  Kant's,  and 
would  have  defined  for  him  the  character  of  a  real  world. 
And  in  the  notion  of  a  world  in  which  the  supreme  reality 
is  a  divine  self,  the  primacy  of  mind  over  matter  would  be 
secured  and  the  Copernican  revolution,  which  metaphysics 
effects  in  the  intellectual  world,  would  be  complete. 

In  a  chapter  devoted  to  method  it  might  seem  that  a 
protracted  criticism  of  Kantism  like  the  one  just  concluded 
were  altogether  out  of  place.  The  only  justification  of  the 
procedure  I  can  think  of  is  the  fact  that  we  have  been 
studying  the  classical  passage  of  modern  philosophy  in 
which  is  given  the  record  of  a  master  mind  struggling  on 
step  by  step  toward  a  conception  of  the  world  that  will 
make  a  rational  interpretation  of  it  possible.  The  Kantian 
instance  reveals  the  fact  that  natural  science  and  meta- 
physics can  only  come  into  intelligible  relations  with  one 
another  when  the  real  difference  of  their  standpoints  and 
methods  has  been  recognized,  and  that  a  complete  rational 
theory  of  the  world  becomes  possible  only  when  we  recog- 
nize the  primacy  of  mind  in  the  world.  The  outcome  for 
the  doctrine  of  method  may  be  summed  up  in  a  few  words. 
We  have  seen  that  in  the  field  of  natural  science,  where  the 
mental  is  held  subordinate  to  the  physical  and  matter  holds 
the  primacy  over  mind,  the  whole  technique  of  method, 
including  its  point  of  view,  its  principles  of  definition  and 
explanation  and  the  ultimate  terms  in  which  it  conceives 
the  world,  are  all  determined  by  physical  requirements 
rather  than  by  requirements  of  mind;  whereas,  in  meta- 
physics mind  asserts  its  primacy  over  matter,  and  this 
primacy  carries  with  it  the  terms  of  a  final  construction 
of  the  world  of  reality  under  the  categories  and  analogies 
of  consciousness,  these  arising  in  connection  with  that 
general  activity  of  consciousness  which  we  call  experience. 

Let  us  now,  in  the  light  of  what  has  preceded,  endeavor 
to  sketch  the  outlines  of  a  complete  method  of  knowledge. 
Following  the  lines  already  laid  down,  the  whole  investi- 


84  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

gation  of  reality  may  be  divided  into  three  stages,  the 
mathematical,  the  physical  and  the  metaphysical.  We 
have  found  that  the  ground-concept  of  things  on  which 
mathematics  proceeds  is  that  of  whole  and  parts.  Every- 
where its  world  resolves  itself  into  wholes  comprised  of  a 
sum  of  parts.  This  appears  most  clearly  and  most  funda- 
mentally also  in  the  notion  of  number  which,  in  its  two- 
sided  significance  as  cardinal  and  ordinal,  everywhere 
deals  with  things  as  groups  representing  wholes  com- 
posed of  sums  of  parts  reached  ordinally  and  designated 
by  the  unit  in  the  natural  scale  which  at  the  same  time 
represents  the  number  of  its  parts.  This  unit  is  called  its 
cardinal  number.  The  cardinal  number  of  any  group  is 
the  unit,  therefore,  that  wTill  describe  it  in  terms  of  whole 
and  parts.  That  is  what  we  mean  when  we  say  that  the 
fundamental  notion  of  mathematics  is  that  of  whole  and 
parts.  Now,  it  has  been  shown  already  how  this  concep- 
tion of  things  is  purely  quantitative ;  how  it  answers  simply 
and  solely  the  questions,  how  much,  and  how  many,  but 
never  any  question  that  involves  the  quality  of  its  terms. 
And  it  has  also  appeared  that  the  whole  value  of  the 
mathematical  procedure  depends  on  the  fixity  and  unalter- 
ableness  of  its  terms;  one  shall  always  mean  one,  and  two, 
two,  in  exactly  the  same  sense.  The  possibility  of  quali- 
tative change  or  modification  in  the  character  of  its  terms 
would  completely  ruin  its  validity.  The  aim  of  the  mathe- 
matical method  is  to  reduce  the  contents  of  the  world  to 
terms  of  exact  quantitative  equivalence.  Falling  short  of 
this,  its  results  are  worthless.  Moreover,  in  the  operation 
of  the  mathematical  method  it  has  been  found  that  in  addi- 
tion to  what  is  called  pure  mathematics,  the  application 
of  its  method  to  the  investigation  of  things  conceived 
under  the  notion  of  pure  quantity, — that  is,  as  a  system  of 
wholes  which  are  the  equivalents  of  the  sum  of  their  parts,— 
there  is  also  a  sphere  of  mixed  or  applied  mathematics  in 
which  the  method  is  employed  in  the  operations  of  the 
physical  sciences.     One  might  well  ask  how  this  can  be  in 


chap.  in.  M  KTHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  S5 

view  of  the  fact  that  the  concepts  of  physics  are  different 
from  those  of  mathematics  and  deal  with  a  world  of  quali- 
tative changes.  The  possibility  of  the  application  arises 
out  of  that  deeper  insight  of  physics  which  leads  it  to 
ground  its  phenomenal  system  in  a  plurality  of  underlying 
substances  out  of  the  causal  interactions  of  which  the  phe- 
nomenal changes  arise.  It  is  found  that  these-  substances 
have  a  quantitative  aspect  which  arises  out  of  their  assumed 
persistence  and  stable  uniformity.  It  is  clear  that  per- 
sistence and  stable  uniformity  involve  quantitative  fixed- 
ness, so  that  neither  increase  nor  diminution  can  be  al- 
lowed to  enter.  This  being  the  case,  the  stable  substances 
or  forces  may  be  assumed  to  produce,  in  the  field  of  phe- 
nomena, relations  which  will  present  quantitative  aspects 
and  be  so  far  open  to  mathematical  determination.  In 
other  words,  forces  that  are  measurable  may  be  assumed  to 
produce  results  that  are  measurable,  and  thus  physical 
changes  may  be  open  to  mathematical  calculation.  But 
this  will  be  in  spite  of,  and  apart  from,  their  character  as 
qualitative  changes.  Mathematics  has  nothing  to  do  with 
qualitative  changes  as  such,  and  it  has  a  place  in  physical 
method  simply  because  physical  phenomena  present  an 
aspect  of  quantity  arising  out  of  their  relation  to  forces  or 
substances  assumed  to  possess  quantitative  fixedness  of 
character. 

In  passing  from  a  system  whose  parts  are  related  by 
means  of  the  principle  of  quantitative  equivalence  to  one 
in  which  the  principle  of  connection  is  natural  causation, 
we  enter  the  domain  of  physical  science.1  Now  physics 
rests  on  a  fundamental  doctrine  of  the  character  of  things. 
We  have  seen  that  mathematics  has  need  of  no  doctrine  of 
the  character  of  things.     It  deals  with  their  quantity,  and 

1  We  use  the  term  physics  and  physical  here  in  a  broad  sense  as 
including  physics  proper  and  biology :  that  is,  inorganic  and  or- 
ganic up  to  the  point  where  mind  asserts  its  primacy.  In  the  second 
part  of  this  volume  the  organic  will  be  distinguished  and  given 
separate   treatment. 


86  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

its  simple  terms  are  what  Kant  called  pure  forms,  that  is, 
forms  of  the  sensible  world  which  are  immediately  present 
to  consciousness.  Altogether  apart  from  the  truth  or  falsity 
of  Kant's  doctrine,  however,  the  fact  stands  undisputed 
that  mathematics  is  never  anywhere  directly  concerned 
with  the  changes  of  things.  But  physics  is  concerned  with 
just  this.  The  world  of  physics  may  still  present  itself 
in  groups  which  are  numerable,  but  this  is  not  that  about 
the  world  in  which  physics  is  interested.  What  concerns 
physics  is  that  the  world  presents  outerly  only  groups  of 
phenomena  that  are  not  self-explanatory.  What  good  does 
it  do  to  number  them?  The  great  questions  are,  How  did 
they  get  there  and  what  is  their  business?  In  short,  the 
questions  of  physics  are  questions  of  causation,  and  a  ques- 
tion of  causation  is  fundamentally  a  question  of  agency 
involving  initiative.  The  real  question  of  physics  is  not 
one  of  phenomena  at  all.  The  phenomena  are  there  and 
physics  is  curious  about  them,  but  its  curiosity  is  easily 
satisfied  by  generalization.  This  is  only  preliminary  to 
what  physics  really  wants  to  know.  What  physics  really 
cares  to  find  out  is  always  a  matter  of  agency.  What  are 
the  agents  of  these  happenings  which  we  call  phenomena? 
Not  only  so,  but  what  are  the  permanent  and  stable  agents 
or  substances  of  whose  activity  they  are  the  symbols  in  the 
field  of  observation  ?  What  has  been  called  ' '  the  bookkeep- 
ing of  science"  represents,  therefore,  a  most  vital  interest. 
Such  being  the  real  interest  of  physics,  its  question  is 
always  one  of  causation;  not  what  this  phenomenon  is, 
though  that  is  interesting  too,  but  what  is  its  explanation. 
Is  it  a  phenomenon  of  heat,  light,  electricity  or  magnetism  ? 
and  if  so,  what  law  of  activity  on  the  part  of  heat,  light, 
electricity  or  magnetism,  does  it  exemplify  ?  Or,  it  may  be 
a  phenomenon  for  the  chemist,  some  case  of  poisoning. 
Here  the  question  is  one  of  agency ;  what  kind  of  substance 
was  it  that  gave  rise  to  the  effect?  The  answer  will  be 
forthcoming  when  the  permanent  substance  is  discovered 
to  which  the  poison-phenomenon  is  to  be  referred.     This 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  87 

substance  itself  may,  of  course,  be  a  compound  or  a  modi- 
fication, but  it  will  be  capable  of  reduction  back  to  simple 
elements,  and  these  will  stand  as  the  permanent  agents, 
the  real  abiding  causes  of  the  effects  in  the  phenomenal 
world.  The  all-del ermining  concept  of  physics  is  thus  the 
notion  of  grounds  and  phenomena,  a  world  of  phenomena 
which  stand  as  symbolizing  effects  of  a  real  world  of 
things  or  substances  which  underlie  them  and  are  the  agents 
in  their  production.  It  is  only  when  the  phenomena  of 
the  physical  world  are  thus  related  as  effects  to  underlying 
permanent  causes  that  the  notion  of  natural  causation  can 
be  realized  at  all.  For  let  us  take  pure  phenomenalism 
which  mistakes  the  symbol  for  the  reality  and  denies  under- 
lying substances;  the  only  notion  of  cause  accessible  to  it 
is  one  that  denies  agency  and  reduces  the  notion  to  one  of 
pure  time-sequence  in  which  anything  may  be  the  cause  of 
anything  (so  Hume  says),  since  to  be  a  cause  is  simply  to 
have  the  luck  to  become  an  invariable  antecedent.  But  on 
the  plane  of  pure  phenomenalism  the  invariability  is  an 
inexplicable  fact.  That  a  should  invariably  precede  b 
is  just  a's  luck.  What  more  can  be  said  about  it?  Pure 
phenomenalism  translates  the  notion  of  cause  into  that  of 
time  plus  luck,  the  latter  being  its  distinguishing  feature. 
If  we  wish  to  avoid  this  we  must  return  to  real  physical 
conceptions  which  are  only  consistent  with  the  notion  of 
agency,  and  we  must  conceive  natural  causation  in  terms 
of  the  agency  of  the  world-substances  or  forces  in  the  pro- 
duction of  phenomenal  changes  which  are  their  symbols. 

Setting  out,  then,  from  this  conception  of  natural  causa- 
tion, let  us  endeavor  to  determine  the  essential  features  of 
the  method  of  physical  science.  It  will,  of  course,  begin 
with  a  careful  analysis  and  generalization  of  its  symbols, 
the  presented  phenomena,  but  the  fundamental  part  of  its 
method  will  be  the  determination  of  these  phenomena 
through  their  causal  connection  with  the  system  of  under- 
lying substances  and  forces.  It  will  be  as  phenomena  of 
oxygen,  hydrogen,  sulpher,  heat,  light,  electricity  or  mag- 


88  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

netism,  that  they  will  have  significance  and  be  open  to 
causal  determination.  For  one  symbol  cannot  be  the  effect 
of  another,  though  it  can  precede  it  invariably  in  an  order 
of  time.  The  reason  for  its  position  in  the  time-series, 
which  will  also  be  the  cause  of  that  phenomenon,  will  not 
be  some  other  phenomenon,  but  some  substance  or  compo- 
sition of  substances  that  underlies  it.  Or,  if  we  do  not  like 
a  mode  of  statement  which  seems  to  separate  the  cause  from 
its  effect,  a  change  of  phraseology  will  lead  to  the  same 
result.  Let  us  resolve  what  we  call  electricity  into  the  acts 
which  Ave  call  electrical  phenomena;  then  it  will  be  true 
that  the  antecedent  act  a  will  be  the  cause  of  the  the  con- 
sequent act  b,  but  in  this  case  it  will  no  longer  be  true  that 
anything  can  be  the  cause  of  anything,  for  b  will  have  a 
determinate  character  which  will  not  only  limit  it  to  an 
electrical  antecedent  but  to  one  with  the  character  of  a. 
In  short,  we  include  in  our  causal  relation  the  notion  of 
agency ;  that  is,  of  a  definite  quality  in  the  antecedent  giv- 
ing rise  to  a  definite  quality  of  the  same  species  in  the 
consequent.  And  that  definite  quality  will  be  the  nature 
of  the  substance  we  call  electricity.  That  this  nature  is 
not  known  to  us  makes  no  difference.  We  know  that  it  is 
this  nature  that  by  maintaining  itself  as  a  permanent  sub- 
stance renders  the  transaction  which  we  call  natural 
causation  possible. 

We  have  seen  that  mathematics  is  indifferent  to  quality 
in  this  sense  and,  therefore,  to  agency.  Physics  deals  with 
quality  and,  therefore,  with  agency,  and  our  question  in 
this  paragraph  concerns  the  kind  of  agency  which  charac- 
terizes the  physical  world.  We  must  not  forget  that  the 
physicist  is  committed  to  the  observational  standpoint,  and 
that  he  must  presume  the  indifference  of  the  nature  with 
which  he  deals,  to  consciousness.  Just  here  a  few  words 
may  be  in  order  as  to  what  exactly  that  indifference  implies. 
It  does  not  imply  that  there  are  absolutely  no  points  of 
community,  for  the  notion  of  agency  itself  supplies  one 
great  point  of  community.     And  as  agency  is  central  in 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  S9 

natural  causation,  it  might  seem  that  the  position  of  indif- 
ference had  not  been  well  taken.  But  agency  is  central  in 
natural  causation  because  it  is  central  in  all  causation. 
The  postulate  of  indifference  arises  higher  up  where  the 
question  is  as  to  the  hind  of  agency  or  causation  in- 
volved. There  is  a  distinction  that  is  fundamental  be- 
tween the  forms  of  what  we  may  call  physical  and  mental 
causation.  If  we  consider  the  mental  type  first  we  shall 
find  that  it  takes  a  form  determined  by  the  nature  of  con- 
sciousness itself.  Its  stimulating  term  is  an  idea  which 
places  what  we  call  the  cause  before  the  act  as  its  end  or 
inducement.  It  thus  acts  as  a  final  or  end-cause,  and  this 
determines  the  form  of  its  agency  which  we  may  call 
teleological.  If,  however,  we  take  the  physical  form  of 
agency,  we  will  find  that  no  idea  is  involved,  but  that  the 
physical  cause  is  conceived  to  be  simply  a  prior  force  or 
activity  which,  by  a  kind  of  pro-pulse,  gives  rise  to  the 
effect.  To  the  form  of  such  activity  we  may  apply  the 
term  mechanical.  The  term  indifference,  then,  when  ap- 
plied to  the  relation  of  physical  activity  to  the  nature  of 
consciousness,  simply  means  that  physical  agency  is  dif- 
ferent from  conscious  agency,  that  it  is  mechanical  rather 
than  teleological.  While,  then,  the  method  of  mathema- 
tics, being  indifferent  to  agency  itself  cannot  be  said  to  be 
either  mechanical  or  teleological,  that  of  physics,  resting  as 
it  does  on  the  principle  of  natural  causation,  but  involving 
no  idea  or  foresight,  may  be  called  mechanical,  and  this 
term  will  signalize  its  points  of  difference  both  from  mathe- 
matics and  from  the  method  of  metaphysics  which  we  now 
proceed  to  characterize. 

The  method  of  metaphysics  is  that  of  consciousness, 
and  we  have  seen  that  this  is  fundamentally  a  method  of 
agency.  This  relates  the  procedure  of  metaphysics  to  that 
of  the  physical  sciences,  for  while  the  principle  of  the 
former  is  not  natural  causation,  it  does  not  follow  that  it 
is  not  any  kind  of  causation.  If  we  identify  causation  in 
its  essentials  with  agency,  we  will  have  a  place  as  central 


90  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

in  metaphysics  as  in  physics.  But  it  will  be  a  different 
species  of  causation.  Let  us  endeavor,  then,  to  define  the 
method  which  is  characteristic  of  metaphysics.  We  have 
seen  that  the  characteristic  notion  of  the  world  in  meta- 
physics is  not  that  of  grounds  and  phenomena,  but  rather 
that  of  idea  and  reality.  If  the  latter  term  stands  for  the 
world  realized,  then  it  will  be  the  correspondent  of  the 
phenomenal  term  of  physics,  but  it  will  be  much  more. 
Physics  almost  empties  its  phenomena  of  reality  and 
reduces  them  to  mere,  though  significant,  symbols,  whereas 
metaphysics  finds  in  the  realized  world  the  very  soul  of 
reality  itself.  Its  phenomenal  term,  if  we  may  use  the 
expression,  is  richer  than  the  unphenomenal  by  just  so 
much  as  the  real  world  is  richer  than  the  world  in  idea. 
Proceeding  under  the  notion  of  idea  and  reality  and  hold- 
ing as  fundamental  the  notion  of  agency  in  its  teleological 
form,  the  method  of  metaphysics  starts  out  with  the  doc- 
trine that  the  world  must  be  conceived  in  idea,  as  the 
condition  of  its  becoming  a  realized  fact.  This  doctrine 
relates  the  procedure  of  metaphysics  to  that  of  physics 
inasmuch  as  it  leads  to  the  overhauling  of  the  notion  of 
natural  causation  which  embodies  the  form  of  mechanical 
agency.  Metaphysics  requires  that  for  the  mechanical  way 
of  producing  effects  the  teleological  way  be  substituted, 
and  it  makes  this  requirement  on  the  ground  that  if  we  are 
seeking  the  ultimate  reason  of  the  world  we  do  not  find  it  in 
mechanism  since  mechanism  gives  us  mere  productivity 
without  foresight.  A  final  agent  must  act  on  grounds  of 
prevision.  If  this  be  conceded,  then  the  prius  of  the  real 
world  must  be  something  in  which  it  is  embodied  in  pre- 
vision. The  world  must  exist  in  idea  before  it  can  exist 
in  reality.  This,  at  least,  must  be  its  mode  of  producing 
results  in  the  sphere  of  reality.  How,  then,  will  this  con- 
clusion determine  the  attitude  of  metaphysics  to  the  physi- 
cal world?  In  the  following  way:  It  will  not  relate 
metaphysics  directly  to  the  phenomenal  aspect  of  the 
physical  world,  but  rather  to  its  non-phenomenal  ground- 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  91 

substances.  And  its  first  problems  will  arise  in  connection 
with  these.  We  have  the  fine  guidance  of  Lotze  here,  who, 
in  much  the  same  spirit  as  that  of  our  own  endeavor,  hav- 
ing translated  natural  mechanical  causation  into  terms  of 
final  teleological  agency,  went  on  to  the  profounder  ques- 
tion as  to  how  the  ultimate  substances  of  physics  shall  be 
dealt  with  in  a  metaphysical  interpretation.  The  doctrine 
of  Lotze  is,  that  no  final  reason  for  the  world  can  be  found 
in  the  notion  of  a  plurality  of  permanent  substances  or 
forces.  And  the  difficulty  is  not  diminished  but  only  in- 
creased by  the  reply  which  is  sometimes  made,  that  these 
forces  are  not  only  permanent,  but  also  act  by  nature  in  a 
determinate  way.  Lotze  regards  this  determinateness  as 
itself  needing  explanation;  for  why  should  a  thoughtless 
force  act  in  a  determinate  way,  and  why  should  a  plurality 
of  thoughtless  forces  bring  about  a  determinate  result? 
The  foundations  of  the  world  can  be  rationalized,  Lotze 
claims,  only  by  grounding  the  world  in  some  reason  or  idea, 
in  which  its  activities  will  be  conceived  and  prevised, 
because  they  are  synthetically  realized.  And  Lotze 's  mind 
is  so  impressed  with  the  need  of  grounding  the  determin- 
ateness of  things  that  he  is  led  to  postulate  as  rational 
world-idea  a  universal  substance  in  which  the  plural  forces 
of  the  world  are  included  and  rendered  determinate. 

One  may  accept  Lotze 's  principle  without  going  to  the 
length  of  postulating  a  universal  substance.  The  funda- 
mental truth  in  Lotze 's  doctrine  lies  in  his  conviction  that 
it  is  in  its  ground-terms  that  physical  science  needs  further 
treatment  by  metaphysics.  And  this  need  arises  in  view 
of  the  mechanical  conception  of  these  ground-terms,  which 
prevails  in  physics  and  which  is,  in  fact,  essential  to  the 
physical  method.  The  root-problem  which  arises  for  meta- 
physics is  one  that  has  no  existence  for  physical  science, 
inasmuch  as  it  is  the  question  whether  any  physical  ex- 
planation can  be  taken  as  a  final  account  of  the  world. 
Physics  is  not  concerned  with  finality,  but  solely  with 
efficiency.     Physics  asks  what  force  or  forces  must  be  pre- 


92 


ANALYSIS.  part  I. 


supposed  as  the  effective  agents  of  this  result  or  group  of 
results,  and  it  is  satisfied  when  an  adequate  account  is 
given  in  terms  of  natural  causation.  But  metaphysics  seeks 
an  answer  that  will  not  simply  satisfy  the  requirement  of 
efficiency,  but  also,  and  especially,  that  of  finality.  Now  the 
final  cause  of  the  world  must  be  found  in  the  ground  of  the 
world,  and  if  the  theory  of  grounds  which  is  offered  does 
not  satisfy  that  demand  it  will  be  rejected  as  metaphysically 
inadequate.  The  method  of  metaphysics  thus  correlates 
with  that  of  physics  while  it  differs  from  it  in  a  charac- 
teristic way.  The  world-idea  of  metaphysics  is  the  world- 
grounds  or  forces  of  natural  science  translated  into  terms 
of  prevision.  Before  the  world  can  be  realized  it  must  be 
prevised  in  some  idea. 

We  do  not  stop  here  to  work  out  the  conception  we  have 
reached,  into  its  details.  But  presuming  that  this  funda- 
mental point  has  been  determined,  it  will  be  clear  that  the 
next  step  will  be  that  of  the  application  of  the  principle  of 
metaphysical  causation  to  the  determination  of  results.  We 
mean  by  metaphysical  causation,  teleological  or  final  causa- 
tion, and  we  have  already  determined  the  form  of  this  as 
purpose.  What,  then,  is  a  purpose  ?  Metaphysically,  it  is  a 
process  in  which  an  effected  (efficiently  caused)  result  is 
brought  about  in  the  form  of  finality,  that  is,  through  the 
prior  conception  of  it  in  idea,  which  conception  arouses  the 
forces  of  its  realization.  What  we  have  described  here  is 
agency  in  the  teleological  form,  in  which  the  pulse  of 
realization  is  volitional.  If  we  include  the  volitional  then, 
wThere  in  the  process  are  we  to  look  for  it?  Manifestly  in 
the  forces  of  realization.  There  are  certain  forces  of 
realization  in  the  world  on  which  physics  puts  a  mechanical 
construction,  and  this  is  adequate  so  long  as  the  problem  is 
simply  that  of  a  uniform  and  stable  grounding  of  phe- 
nomena. When,  however,  the  question  is  one  of  the  real 
nature  of  the  world,  the  mechanical  conception  of  these 
agents  will  not  be  adequate.  Metaphysically,  we  look  to 
our  data  not  only  to  establish  but  also  to  explain  phe- 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  93 

nomena,  and  we  therefore  ask  our  theory  to  satisfy  the 
demand  of  finality  as  well  as  that  of  efficiency.  And 
inasmuch  as  the  differentia  of  metaphysics  lies  in  its  pro- 
visional character,  the  explanation  which  will  be  adequate 
will  be  the  one  that  connects  efficiency  with  the  spring 
of  prevision  in  which  its  end  and  aim  are  determined.  The 
second  great  step  in  metaphysical  method,  then,  is  the 
translation  of  the  mechanical  forces  of  physics  into  voli- 
tional agents  which  work  toward  the  realization  of  a  previ- 
sional  end.  It  is  a  false  method  that  deems  it  necessary  to 
cast  the  physical  forces  to  the  dogs  in  order  to  make  room 
for  metaphysical  agencies. 

That  this  is  a  vital  point  in  metaphysical  method  will 
appear  from  the  following  considerations.  If  the  worlds 
of  natural  science  and  metaphysics  have  not  a  common 
content  on  which  they  simply  put  constructions  developed 
from  different  points  of  view,  then  there  are  practically 
two  independent  worlds,  and  any  correlation  that  is  possi- 
ble between  them  will  be  a  purely  external  and  artificial 
affair.  If,  however,  these  two  disciplines  represent  simply 
different  constructions  put  on  the  same  content,  it  follows 
that  the  essentials  of  the  one  method  will  find  their  equiva- 
lents in  the  terms  of  the  other.  Thus,  for  natural  causation 
in  physics  we  have  final  cause  in  metaphysics,  and  for 
mechanical  activity  in  the  production  of  effects  we  have 
volitional  activity  in  the  realization  of  ends;  while  for  the 
effects  themselves  we  have  realized  ends  or  purposes.  If 
anything  be  lost  sight  of  in  the  transition  from  one  point 
of  view  to  the  other,  a  defective  conception  of  method  will 
be  the  result.  Now,  one  of  the  essentials  of  the  method  of 
natural  science  is  the  presumption  of  productive  efficiency 
or  agency  on  the  part  of  its  ground-substances  or  forces. 
Without  this  its  view  of  the  world  is  emptied  of  reality. 
The  equivalents  of  these  in  the  method  of  metaphysics  are 
the  volitional  forces  which  take  on  the  teleological  form. 
The  question  here,  stated  exactly,  is  whether  we  are  to 
conceive   the   volitional   forces   as   the   equivalents   of   the 


94  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

physical  agencies  in  the  mathematical  sense,  that  is, 
numerically  equivalent  but  different  in  substance;  or  in  a 
sense  the  reverse  of  this,  which  would  maintain  numerical 
difference  and  at  the  same  time  identity  of  substance. 
The  former  alternative  leads,  as  wre  have  pointed  out,  to  a 
complete  dualism  by  opening  a  chasm  over  which  there  is 
no  natural  bridge.  The  latter  is  the  one  that  is  chosen 
here  because  it  avoids  this  breach  in  the  real  and  at  the 
same  time  seems  to  be  in  itself  a  more  adequate  and  rational 
conception  of  method. 

Let  us  consider  it  briefly.  To  be  numerically  different 
is  to  be  different  in  form  but  not  necessarily  in  substance. 
Two  rain-drops  are  numerically  different,  but  they  are  the 
same  in  substance.  A  gallon  of  water  and  a  block  of  ice 
are  numerically  different,  but  they  are  identical  in  sub- 
stance. We  have  seen  that  physical  and  metaphysical 
agency  are  different  in  form.  One  is  mechanical,  the  other 
teleological.  This  does  not  preclude  any  degree  of  identity 
of  substance  we  may  find  reason  for  ascribing  to  them. 
We  have  seen  that  the  physical  agents  are  translated  into 
metaphysical  by  adding  something  to  them,  and  that  some- 
thing is  prevision.  Add  prevision  to  a  physical  agent  and 
you  translate  it  into  an  ideal  agent,  that  is,  an  agent  whose 
activity  is  informed  and  guided  by  an  idea.  This  change 
inevitably  leads  to  others.  The  mechanical  form  of  effi- 
ciency is  changed  to  the  teleological,  but  it  is  still  an  energy 
that  does  something  and  produces  results.  The  effect  is 
changed  into  the  realized  idea,  but  it  is  still  a  resultant  of 
some  kind  of  energizing.  In  the  metaphysical  scheme 
we  employ  the  energizing  of  will  as  the  equivalent  in 
physics  of  the  energizing  of  natural  causality.  What  is 
changed  is  the  form,  from  natural  causation  to  will ;  what 
remains  unchanged  is  the  agency  that  is  efficient  in  getting 
results:  in  one  case,  phenomenal  effects;  in  the  other, 
realized  ends. 

The  third  vital  step  in  metaphysical  method  bears  oti 
the  connection  between  the  phenomenal  world  of  physics 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  95 

and  the  realized  world  of  metaphysics.  Are  these  one,  or 
are  they  different?  The  answer  here  depends  altogether 
on  the  conception  we  form  of  the  phenomenal  world.  If 
we  regard  it  as  punhj  phenomenal,  and  this  we  saw  is  the 
customary  view  of  physics,  then  the  phenomenon  becomes 
a  mere  symbol  of  deeper  reality  and  is  in  itself  little  more 
than  appearance.  But  we  have  seen  that  there  is  a  deeper 
view  open  to  the  physicist  himself.  He  can  immanate  his 
forces  in  his  phenomena  so  that  these  become  acts  of 
dynamic  agents.  The  phenomenon  is  not  a  mere  symbol 
then,  but  has  in  it  the  hidden  nature  of  which  it  is  an 
outer  expression.  The  phenomenal  thns  becomes  the  real 
in  action,  or  rather,  the  real  in  motion,  and  in  studying  the 
motions  of  things  the  physicist  is  never  away  from  the 
heart  of  the  things  themselves.  It  is  with  this  deeper  view 
that  metaphysics  naturally  correlates.  For  its  basal  notion 
is  that  of  idea  and  reality,  and  its  conviction  is  that  reality 
is  richer  than  idea  in  the  sense  that  it  adds  fulfillment  to 
the  idea.  Just  as  the  world  of  moving  agents,  that  is, 
of  causes  realizing  themselves  in  their  effects,  is  richer  than 
that  of  grounds  merely,  or  causes  conceived  apart  from 
their  effects ;  so  the  reality  of  metaphysics,  which  is  that  of 
idea  realized  through  purpose,  is  richer  than  the  ideal 
world  conceived  apart  from  its  realization.  What  we 
maintain  here,  then,  is  the  substantial  identity  of  the  two 
spheres,  the  phenomenal  world  of  physics,  taken  in  the 
deeper  sense  indicated,  and  the  reality  of  metaphysics. 
For  while  they  are  formally  distinct,  the  one  being  a 
system  of  effects  mechanically  related  to  their  causes,  the 
other  a  system  of  realities  in  which  the  idea  is  Ideologically 
related  to  its  fulfillment,  yet  in  substance  they  are  the  same 
world;  onty,  what  the  physicist  treats  for  good  and  suffi- 
cient reasons  as  a  mechanical  result,  the  metaphysician,  for 
equally  valid  reasons,  treats  as  a  teleological  and  ideal 
result.  If  the  physicist  happens  at  the  same  time  to 
be  a  metaphysician,  or  if  the  metaphysician  happens  to  be 
a  physicist,  or  is  in  intelligent  sympathy  with  the  physi- 


96  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

cist's  point  of  view,  he  will  find  this  doctrine  very  easy, 
however  difficult  it  may  be  in  outward  appearance. 

The  last  topic  we  shall  attempt  to  treat  in  this  already 
protracted  discussion  is  that  of  the  method  of  dealing  with 
the  final  theme  of  metaphysics,  its  doctrine  of  the  ultimate 
nature  of  the  real.  The  question  here  is  that  so  subtly 
argued  by  Lotze,  whether  the  individual  substances  of  the 
world  are  adequate  to  its  rational  explanation,  or  whether 
we  must,  as  Lotze  does,  postulate  a  universal  substance  as 
a  unitary  and  determinate  ground  of  the  individual  forces. 
Metaphysics  generally  recognizes  the  necessity  of  some 
absolute  or  unitary  force  or  being.  But  we  have  here  to 
face  the  question  whether,  instead,  a  plurality  of  individual ' 
forces,  particularly  when  they  are  represented  as  in- 
formed with  ideas,  would  not  be  sufficient.  We  have  seen 
that  a  fundamental  article  of  metaphysical  faith  is  that 
the  world  must  mean  something,  and  this  has  led  to  its 
translation  of  the  world-forces  into  idea-forces,  through 
the  agency  of  prevision.  If,  then,  it  be  a  fundamental 
demand  that  the  world  have  meaning,  it  is  a  fair  claim 
to  make  under  this  specification,  that  the  world  as  a 
whole  should  have  meaning.  And  since  to  have  mean- 
ing is,  in  the  sense  of  its  use  here,  to  have  intention, 
that  is,  to  be  represented  subjectively  in  idea  and  ob- 
jectively in  an  end-scheme  of  realization,  it  follows  that 
the  world  as  a  whole  must  stand  related  to  intention 
and  have  its  place  in  an  ideal  scheme  of  objective  ful- 
fillment. But  in  resolving  the  world  into  a  system  of 
idea-forces  have  we  not  broken  with  the  hypothesis  of  a 
universal  substance,  and,  if  so,  how  do  we  propose  to 
transcend  pure  individualism?  This  is  a  formidable  ques- 
tion, but  not,  we  think,  unanswerable.  The  postulate  of 
the  universal  substance  is  in  a  sense  a  survival  that  has  per- 
sisted after  the  notion  which  called  it  forth  has  perished. 
That  notion  was  the  scholastic  doctrine  of  a  substratum, 
espoused  by  Locke  and  thus  given  a  modern  vogue.  Ac- 
cording  to  this   doctrine   all   the    qualities   of   things   are 


chap.  in.  METHODS  IN  PHILOSOPHY.  97 

related  to  substances  in  which  they  inhere  somewhat  as 
pins  inhere  in  a  pincushion.  This  is  a  crude  figure,  of 
course,  but  it  sufficiently  well  represents  the  substratum- 
theory  of  the  connection  between  qualities  and  the  things 
they  qualify.  If  we  regard  the  whole  manifested  world, 
including  not  only  material  phenomena,  but  also  thoughts, 
feelings,  and  conscious  acts  generally,  as  related  to  some 
underlying  ground  conceived  after  the  analogy  of  the 
substratum,  we  reach  the  notion  of  a  universal  substance. 
But  the  notion  of  a  substratum  having  been  exploded,  that 
of  a  universal  substance  has  become  a  mere  survival 
without  rational  justification.  Let  it  be  dismissed,  then, 
and  let  us  ask  what  we  have  left  to  put  in  its  place.  We 
have  seen  that  the  legitimacy  of  the  requirement  that  the 
world  shall  have  meaning  as  a  whole,  must  be  admitted. 
How  can  the  world  have  meaning  as  a  whole  if  there  be  no 
universal  substance?  Metaphysics  can  answer  only  by 
falling  back  on  its  doctrine  of  selfhood.  Only  if  the  world- 
idea  be  translated  into  the  notion  of  a  world-self  can  the 
unitary  requirement  be  fulfilled.  But  here  we  seem  to 
meet  the  dilemma  of  individualism.  You  have  translated 
your  world  into  a  plurality  of  idea-forces,  how  are  you 
going  to  escape  pluralism?  Thus  the  objector  may  urge. 
Well,  the  same  appearance  of  pluralism  exists  in  conscious- 
ness where  wTe  find  a  plurality  of  self-conscious  ideas,  but 
only  one  unitary  self  maintaining  itself  in  and  through  the 
plurality  of  idea-forces  and  securing  the  unity  of  its 
world.  We  marvel  at  the  wonderful  thing  we  call  self: 
how  it  can  thus  be  wholly  present  in  a  plurality  of  acts 
and  yet  unify  this  plurality  under  one  point  of  view. 

We  have  only  to  substitute  this  analogy  for  that  of  the 
pins  in  the  pincushion  in  order  to  see  how  our  question 
can  be  answered.  The  unitary  being  in  our  consciousness 
is  not  some  hidden  thing  that  must  be  grasped  in  a  pre- 
supposition. It  is  the  selfhood  which  we  apprehended  in  con- 
sciousness, and  this  selfhood  is  the  real  center  of  the  inner 
life.  We  do  not  need  to  look  for  some  ultra-conscious  prin- 
7 


98  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

ciple  for  the  unification  of  our  conscious  world.  If,  then, 
we  apply  the  analogy  of  selfhood  to  the  macrocosm  outside 
of  us,  we  shall  discover  that  the  idea-forces  outside  are  the 
natural  bearers  of  the  function  of  selfhood.  The  plurality 
of  forces  is  no  obstacle  except  in  appearance,  for  we  have 
learned  in  our  own  experience  how  selfhood  can  maintain 
itself  in  a  plural  world.  This  maintenance  we  know  im- 
mediately. But  the  objective  maintenance  we  know  only 
by  inference ;  we  are  not  the  idea-forces  of  the  world.  But 
we  know  by  inference  founded  on  immediate  experience 
how  the  idea-forces  in  our  consciousness  become  the  bearers 
of  the  self  and  its  unifying  function.  And  inasmuch  as 
metaphysics  demands  that  the  world  should  have  meaning 
as  a  whole,  the  answer  to  this  demand  will  be  found  in  the 
doctrine  of  the  absolute  being,  not  conceived  now  as  some 
all-devouring  substance,  but  as  a  self  which  can  ride  on  the 
backs  of  many  world-steeds,  holding  the  reins  of  all  and 
directing  all  to  one  common  goal. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  WORLD  OF  EXISTENTS. 

Taking  the  world  in  the  concrete,  it  resolves  itself  into 
two  groups  of  existences ;  the  one  occupied  by  the  conscious 
self,  the  other  by  the  rest  of  the  things  which  make  up  the 
world.  Now  we  are  about  to  ask  here  as  our  first  question, 
not  how  we  know  self,  but  how  we  know  the  things  in  the 
larger  group  which  belongs  to  the  not-self.  And  we  are  not 
putting  the  psychological  question  about  the  way  in  which 
things  come  to  be  apprehended,  but  rather  the  more  fun- 
damental question  as  to  the  grounds  on  which  we  assert 
their  real  existence.  By  real  existence  I  do  not  mean  bare 
existence,  which  is  a  thing  of  presentation,  but  rather  the 
kind  of  status  a  thing  is  supposed  to  have  when  it  is  able 
to  persist  even  when  we  are  not  perceiving  it  or  thinking 
about  it.  I  come  to  my  study  in  the  morning  and  find  my 
ink-bottle  standing  where  I  left  it  the  evening  before  and  I 
assume  that  it  has  existed  during  the  interval  of  my 
absence.  The  ink-bottle  is  not,  therefore,  a  mere  modifica- 
tion of  my  consciousness ;  it  really  exists.  Now  such  being 
the  fact,  there  are  two  questions  regarding  this  ink-bottle 
which  I  wish  to  have  answered.  In  the  first  place,  how  do  I 
know  that  it  is  an  object  and  not  merely  my  own  subjective 
impression ;  and  secondly,  on  what>  grounds  do  I  say  that 
it  really  exists?  The  first  question  is  not  psychological 
but  epistemological,  while  the  second  is  metaphysical. 
How  do  I  know  that  the  ink-bottle  is  an  object  and  not  a 

99 


100  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

mere  subjective  impression?  I  may  be  told  that  this  is  all 
it  was  at  first  and  that  its  objectivity  is  the  result  of  a 
social  process.  But  this  account  does  not  satisfy  me  be- 
cause I  am  convinced  that  even  the  social  process  cannot 
create  something  out  of  nothing;  that  it  must  have  some 
objective  data  to  work  upon.  There  must  be  something 
for  somebody  to  see  before  it  can  be  seen  by  a  group  of 
observers.  The  position  maintained  here  is  that  the  object 
has  its  first  rise  in  the  initial  acts  of  the  objective  conscious- 
ness. Otherwise  it  is  located  too  far  down  the  stream  and 
never  acquires  full  status.  Let  us  suppose  the  ink-bottle 
to  be  brought  within  range  of  the  optics  of  a  child  in  the 
first  stages  of  learning  to  see.  The  child  will  not  perceive 
the  ink-bottle  as  any  defined  object,  but  where  an  ink- 
bottle  would  appear  to  adult  perception  there  will  arise 
some  point  of  disturbance  in  the  child's  world,  and'  this 
will  arouse  what  we  call  attention:  that  is,  it  will  focus 
what  cognitive  elements  there  may  be  in  the  child's  con- 
sciousness on  the  point  of  disturbance  and  the  result  will  be 
the  first  step  in  the  objective  definition  of  its  Avorld.  This 
will  doubtless  in  this  instance  be  some  point  or  patch  of 
raised  color  indefinitely  located  but  defined,  so  far  as  it  is 
defined  at  all,  by  its  color-contrast  and  its  spatiality.  How, 
then,  are  we  to  interpret  this  first  cognitive  experiment 
of  the  infant  consciousness?  Has  it  just  made  a  mere 
specification  of  itself,  or  has  it  also  performed  a  transac- 
tion in  the  objective  world?  If  we  deny  it  to  be  the  latter, 
where  does  the  experience  of  the  objective  begin?  If  this 
first  act  is  simply  a  self -modification,  we  should  naturally 
expect  that  further  experience  would  make  this  clear.  But 
further  experience  only  confirms  the  illusion  of  objectivity, 
if  it  be  an  illusion.  Our  experience  must  begin  with  first 
terms  which  are  not  further  resolvable,  and  what  we  main- 
tain here  is  that  the  perception  of  the  objective  is  ab- 
solutely primary  and  underived.  The  infant's  perception 
of  the  ink-bottle  is  a  definition  of  objective  matter,  or  it 
is  nothing  at  all.     Carrying  out  the  doctrine  here  indicated, 


ctiap.  iv.  THE  WORLD  OF  EXISTENTS.  101 

we  may  say  that  objective  existence  is  given  in  the  forms 
in  which  things  get  themselves  defined  in  presentation. 
We  do  not  need  to  worry  about  objective  existence;  it  is 
with  ns  from  the  beginning. 

The  second  question,  that  of  real  existence,  is  one  that 
involves  several  profound  considerations.  In  the  first 
place,  when  we  ascribe  real  existence  to  a  thing,  say  to  this 
ink-bottle,  we  do  more  than  assume  it  to  be  an  object,  a 
not-self.  We  assume  it  to  be  a  not-self  which  somehow  has 
the  power  in  itself  of  persisting  or  continuing  to  be  itself 
when  we  are  not  perceiving  or  thinking  about  it.  Mill 
would  say  that  the  ink-bottle  includes,  besides  the  per- 
ceptions, a  permanent  possibility  of  perceptions,  and  that 
this  is  what  is  meant  by  ascribing  to  it  real  existence. 
But  if  this  possibility  be  not  itself  more  perception,  which 
it  would  be  absurd  to  suppose,  then  it  is  something  different 
from  perception.  We  do  not  seek  to  determine  what  it  is 
here,  but  what  we  call  real  existence  is  this  power  to  persist 
in  being,  apart  from  our  perceptions.  What,  then,  is 
involved  in  the  notion  of  real  things  not  ourselves,  and 
how  are  we  led  to  ascribe  the  quality  of  real  existence  to 
them?  Our  world  of  things  is  made  up  of  two  classes  of 
objects  which  we  call  physical  and  mental.  These  may  be 
distinguished  further  into  objects  proper  and  what  W.  K. 
Clifford  first  named  ejects.  And  both  physical  and  mental 
objects  involve  the  distinction  between  the  object  proper 
and  the  eject.  This  ink-bottle,  for  example,  is  object  in  so 
far  as  it  manifests  itself  to  my  perceptions.  As  object,  it 
is  a  manifested  group  of  qualities.  But  the  ink-bottle  is 
also  an  eject.  It  has  a  persistent  being  which  is  not  per- 
ception. This  being  is  not  apparent  but  hidden,  and  is 
not,  therefore,  immediately  apprehended,  but  is  grasped 
in  an  inference.  The  ink-bottle  as  a  real  existence  includes 
in  its  being,  or  in  that  which  makes  it  real,  not  simply  a 
group  of  perceptions  to  which  it  gives  rise  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  some  observer,  but  also,  and  more  funda- 
mentally, a  hidden  something  which  enables  the  ink-bottle 


102  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

to  persist  when  not  actually  manifesting  itself  in  percep- 
tions and  which  is  presumed,  therefore,  to  be  the  ground 
or  cause  of  the  perceptions  themselves.  The  ink-bottle  in 
its  hidden  nature  is  what,  following  Clifford,  we  would  call 
an  eject  of  the  physical  type.  By  this  I  mean :  (1)  that  it 
is  an  object  and  not  myself;  (2)  that  its  inner  ejective 
nature  is  to  be  taken  as  physical  rather  than  mental.  How 
do  I  know  this  latter  fact?  Not  by  any  direct  process 
whatever.  In  ascribing  real  existence  to  the  ink-bottle  I 
have  assumed  not  merely  its  objectivity,  which  I  know  as  a 
primary  fact,  but  also  its  persistent  being,  Avhich  appar- 
ently I  do  not  know  at  all.  The  Humian  has  an  easy  task 
refuting  the  realist  at  this  point  until  he  runs  up  against 
the  absurdity  of  his  own  position  that  real  existence  is 
nothing  but  perception.  At  any  rate  we  do  seem  to 
be  very  sure  of  something  here  about  which  we  apparently 
know  nothing.  But  is  it  so  certain  that  we  have  no  knowl- 
edge? Professor  C.  A.  Strong1  ascribes  our  assurance  of 
ejective  existence  to  an  original  race-instinct  and  appar- 
ently regards  it  as  otherwise  inexplicable.  This  is  to  make 
our  faith  in  the  real  existence  of  other  minds  than  our  own 
irrational  and  I  understand  Professor  Strong  to  admit  that 
it  does.  Now,  such  a  conclusion  does  not  shock  me,  but  I 
am  not  quite  ready  to  admit  it.  We  have  seen  that  our 
knowledge  of  the  object  is  of  the  most  primary  character. 
We  cannot  call  it  in  question,  without  denying  the  possi- 
bility of  all  knowledge.  But  our  assertion  of  ejective 
reality  is  not,  at  least,  a  doctrine  of  immediate  knowledge. 
If  we  know  it  at  all  it  must  be  by  inference,  and  if  our 
knowledge  be  inferential,  from  what  data  is  the  inference 
drawn  ? 

Let  us  carry  our  inquiry  into  another  field.  We  have 
seen  in  a  former  chapter  that  natural  science  rests  on  a 
distinction  between  phenomena  and  their  grounds,  and  that 
the  phenomenon  is  connected  with  its  ground  by  natural 

1  In  Why  the  Mind  Has  a  Body.     The  Macmillan  Co.,  1903. 


chap.  iv.  THE  WOELD  OF  EXISTENTS.  103 

causation.  Translating  the  terms  of  natural  science  into 
terms  of  object  and  eject  as  above  defined,  it  is  evident  that 
the  object  will  be  the  phenomenon  while  the  eject  will  be 
the  ground-substance  or  force  with  which  it  is  connected  by 
natural  causation.  The  world  of  objectivity  will  thus, 
when  distinguished  from  its  grounds,  become  a  system  of 
symbolical  effects  of  the  world  of  underlying  substances 
and  forces ;  that  is,  of  the  world  of  ejects.  Why,  then,  does 
natural  science  assert  the  existence  of  this  world  of  ejects? 
Not  from  any  direct  knowledge  of  their  existence,  but 
because,  without  presuming  their  existence,  the  phenomenal 
world  itself  would  become  wholly  irrational  and  absurd. 
The  phenomenal  world  is  merely  symbolic  and  does  not 
have  meaning  in  itself.  Besides,  as  we  have  seen,  in  itself 
it  is  lacking  in  persistent  uniformity  and  stability.  The 
main  reason  for  asserting  the  real  existence  of  the  physical 
eject  arises,  then,  in  view  of  the  absurdity  and  irrationality 
of  its  denial.  "We  assert  it  inferentially  because  of  our 
perception  of  the  absurdity  which  would  result  from  its 
denial.  Returning  once  more  to  the  ink-bottle,  I  am  able 
to  say  now  that  my  assertion  of  its  real  existence  is 
not  without  rational  support.  I  assert  the  persistence  of 
the  ink-bottle  during  the  interval  when  it  is  not  symboliz- 
ing itself  in  perceptions,  because  of  my  immediate  sense  of 
the  absurdity  which  would  arise  from  its  denial.1  My 
knowledge  is  not  baseless,  but  is  an  inference  resting  di- 
rectly on  negative  data. 

It  may  be  objected,  however,  that  this  knowledge,  even 
granting  its  validity,  is  a  product  of  later  reflection  and  is 
antedated  in  experience  by  our  earliest  assertions  of  the 
real  existence  of  physical  objects.     This  may  be  so,  and  it 

1  Of  course  it  is  open  to  say  that  there  is  an  alternative  to  this 
which  prevents  its  denial  from  being  absurd,  and  this  is  the  doctrine 
of  re-creation.  But  re-creation  assumes  some  energy  of  production 
outside  of  the  object.  If  not,  then  it  assumes  the  power  of  the 
object  to  re-create  itself,  which  is  of  course  to  assume  its  per- 
sistence. 


104  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

is  clear  that  we  are  not  yet  at  the  end  of  our  analysis. 
There  is,  no  doubt,  a  sense  in  which  even  an  ordinary  dog 
learns  to  ascribe  eject ive  reality  to  the  things  of  his  world, 
even  to  the  point  of  distinguishing  in  some  way  between 
the  mental  and  physical  species.  The  dog  learns  to  read 
the  mind  of  his  master,  and  this  involves,  in  some  vague 
sense  at  least,  the  knowledge  that  his  master  has  a  mind. 
The  ordinary  dog  also  learns  to  know  the  difference  between 
purely  physical  objects,  trees  and  stones,  and  those  that  are 
mental.  His  reactions  upon  the  physical  are  different 
from  his  reactions  upon  other  dogs  or  upon  his  master. 
A  study  of  this  primitive  kind  of  experience  may  enable 
us  to  come  upon  what  Professor  Strong  calls  the  original 
race-instinct  which  he  conceives  to  be  at  the  bottom  of  the 
business.  We  are  not  required  to  suppose  that  the  dog, 
in  distinguishing  physical  objects  from  other  dogs  and 
from  men,  or  in  reading  the  mind  of  his  master,  under- 
stands fully  the  rationale  of  the  actions  he  is  performing. 
In  truth,  there  would  be  no  exaggeration  in  saying  from 
one  point  of  view  that  he  has  no  understanding  at  all  of 
the  reason  of  his  conduct.  But,  from  another  point  of 
view,  he  has  an  understanding.  He  has  his  dog-reason  for 
treating  a  tree  or  a  stone  as  a  real  existence  which  may  be 
expressed  as  follows.  He  has  no  doubt  as  to  the  objective 
existence  of  these  things,  for  that  is  given  to  him  in  his 
primary  experiences.  What  he  has  to  learn  about  them  is 
their  real  existence;  that  is,  their  ejective  nature.  Were 
the  dog  capable  of  drawing  inferences  from  simple  percep- 
tional data,  it  might  be  possible  for  him  to  reach  some 
recognition  of  this  reality  by  a  simple  comparison  of  his 
perceptions,  after  the  manner  of  Mill.  But  we  cannot 
ascribe  such  faculties  of  inference  to  an  ordinary  dog. 
We  must  presuppose  a  more  impressive  and  startling  kind 
of  experience  in  the  dog's  case.  He  is,  perhaps,  pursuing 
some  game  which  darts  around  or  behind  a  tree  or  stone, 
while  the  dog  in  close  pursuit  dashes  his  head  against  the 
object.     An  experience  or  two  of  this  kind  would  teach  him 


chap.  iv.  THE  WORLD  OF  EXISTENTS.  105 

to  respect  the  tree  or  the  stone,  that  is,  to  treat  it  as  some- 
thing' that  has  the  power  of  resisting  and  hurting  him,  and 
his  experience  would  also  call  forth  his  latent  memory  and 
association-processes,  the  result  of  which  woidd  be  his 
power  to  recognize  the  tree  or  the  stone  as  an  object  which 
would  arouse  certain  experiences  even  before  he  had 
actually  repeated  the  experience  of  their  arousal.  The  dog 
would  thus  fill  out  the  Mill-category  by  coming  to  regard 
the  tree  or  stone  not  only  as  a  group  of  present  perceptions, 
but  also  as  a  permanent  possibility  of  perceptions.  How- 
ever, he  would  verify  the  M ill-psychology  in  a  wTay  Mill  did 
not  anticipate.  For  the  persistent  possibility  which  repre- 
sented the  real  existence  to  the  dog  would  be  a  permanent 
possibility  of  certain  vivid  and  painful  experiences  with 
which  the  tree  or  stone  is  immediately  associated  as  the 
cause,  while  the  object  of  the  ordinary  perception  would  be 
associated  with  this  real  object  as  the  present  symbol  of  its 
existence.  And  the  clog's  future  conduct  would  prove  that 
this  is  the  state  of  his  mind  with  regard  to  these  objects; 
for,  on  perceiving  them  again  as  objects,  even  though  in 
full  cry  after  game,  he  will  take  the  hint  and  avoid  that 
form  of  collision  which  he  has  learned  to  associate  with  his 
former  vivid  and  painful  experiences. 

Pursuing  the  experience  of  our  ordinary  dog  still 
further,  we  find  that  he  learns  to  react  upon  other  dogs 
and  upon  his  master  in  precisely  the  same  way,  but  that 
the  experience  here  is  more  complex  than  it  was  in  the  case 
of  physical  objects.  He  learns  to  respond  to  every  move- 
ment of  his  master,  to  a  whistle  or  even  to  a  glance  of  his 
eye.  The  responsive  relation  becomes  so  complicated  as 
almost  to  defy  analysis.  But  in  all  cases  we  have  the  same 
situation  repeating  itself;  the  object  symbolized  in  per- 
ception taken  as  representing  a  deeper  reality  with  whose 
agency  a  complex  of  deeper  and  more  impressive  experi- 
ences is  associated.  The  difference  which  the  dog  recog- 
nizes between  physical  objects  like  trees  and  stones,  and  a 
mental  object  like  his  master,  is  one  that  has  its  source, 


106  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

not  in  any  distinction  which  arises  in  the  perceptional  world 
between  the  appearance  of  trees  and  stones  on  the  one  hand 
and  that  of  his  master  on  the  other,  but  altogether  in  a 
difference  belonging  to  the  sphere  of  the  deeper  and 
more  impressive  reactions.  It  is  a  distinction  which  belongs 
to  things  in  virtue  of  that  permanency  of  reactive  agency 
which  connects  them  vitally  with  the  course  and  the 
fortunes  of  the  dog's  own  life.  Borrowing  again  the  lan- 
guage of  natural  science,  the  dog's  recognition  of  ejects  as 
well  as  his  distinction  between  physical  and  mental  ejects 
is  an  experience  which  belongs  essentially  to  that  world  of 
substances  or  forces  which  the  phenomenal  world  sym- 
bolizes. 

But  even  yet  we  have  not  quite  reached  the  bottom  of 
the  dog's  experience.  We  have  found  that  his  reason  for 
recognizing  the  real  existence  of  things  is  that  they  sym- 
bolize to  him  the  permanent  recurrence  of  certain  inter- 
esting experiences,  under  certain  conditions.  Whatever 
behaves  so  will  be  recognized  as  a  real  existence  in  the  dog's 
world.  But  we  have  not  found  as  yet  why  the  dog's  pre- 
sumption takes  this  particular  form  rather  than  some 
other.  What  the  dog  does,  in  fact,  whether  he  understands 
his  conduct  or  not,  is  to  treat  real  existences  as  the  per- 
sistent subjects  of  causal  energy.  They  have  the  persistent 
power  of  producing  effects  and  the  dog,  learning  what 
these  effects  are,  learns  to  classify  them  accordingly.  But 
where  does  the  dog  come  upon  the  norm  of  such  an  inferen- 
tial instinct  (if  we  choose  to  call  it  an  instinct)  as  this? 
We  can  find  no  answer  to  this  question  until  we  recognize 
the  fact  that  the  absolute  source  of  this  kind  of  experience 
for  the  dog  is  found  in  his  immediate  sense  of  his  own 
agency.  His  sense  of  his  own  agency,  however  vague  it 
may  be,  will  be  sufficient  to  enable  him  to  connect  the 
reactions  he  makes  upon  the  objective  world  with  some  per- 
sistent center  of  conscious  activity  within  him.  His  con- 
sciousness does  not  need  to  be  of  a  very  high  order  in  order 
to  give  him  the  norm  of  presumption  with  which  he  will 


chap.  iv.  THE  WORLD  OF  EXTSTENTS.  107 

go  out  into  the  world.  This  presumptive  norm,  as  we  shall 
call  it  here,  is  the  dog's  guiding  star  in  all  his  experiences 
of  the  world,  and  we  are  to  suppose  that  his  use  of  this 
norm  will  he  a  purely  spontaneous  use,  one  that  is  wholly 
free  from  what  we  would  call  thought  or  reflection.  Now, 
we  may  not  be  justified  in  calling  the  thoughtless  and 
altogether  spontaneous  use  of  such  a  norm,  inference.  It 
may  be  an  abuse  of  language  to  say  that  the  dog  infers  the 
ejeetive  existence  of  his  master.  But  he  does  a  thing  which 
has  exactly  the  same  form  as  inference.  Shall  we  call  this 
instinct,  or  would  a  better  name  for  it  be  spontaneous 
reason?  Some  one  has  defined  instinct  as  'the  doing  of  a 
rational  act  without  any  insight  into  its  rationality.'  If 
this  be  a  true  notion  of  instinct,  the  dog's  conduct  may  be 
called  instinctive.  But  the  nature  of  instinct  is  in  debate 
at  present,  the  prevailing  tendency  being  to  reduce  it  to  a 
principle  of  habit.  There  is,  however,  more  than  the 
habitual  in  the  dog's  attitude  toward  the  real  existences  of 
the  world.  We  have  traced  his  experience  down  to  its 
source  in  a  vague  sense  of  the  form  of  his  own  agency. 
This  agency  would,  no  doubt,  supply  him  with  a  norm  for 
inference  by  means  of  which  he  would  be  led  to  posit  a 
cause  of  his  experience  analogous  to  the  self  in  his  own 
conscious  agency.  If,  then,  we  define  an  instinctive  re- 
action as  one  that  has  its  entire  motive  in  repetition  and 
habit,  it  is  incumbent  on  us  to  regard  the  act  in  which  the 
dog  recognizes  the  real  existent  which  his  perceptions  sym- 
bolize not  as  instinctive  purely,  but  as  one  of  spontaneous 
causal  inference. 

If,  then,  we  permit  ourselves  to  say  that  the  dog-con- 
sciousness is  capable  of  a  certain  spontaneous  use  of  the 
self-analogy  and  that  this  supplies  him  with  the  norm  of 
construction  in  the  processes  by  which  he  reaches  the 
recognition  of  the  real  existences  of  his  world,  we  shall, 
perhaps,  be  able  to  answer  another  interesting  question ; 
namely,  Which  kind  of  eject,  the  physical  or  the  mental, 
is  likelv  to  meet  with  the  first  recognition  in  the  dog's 


108  ANALYSIS.  parti, 

world?  It  is,  of  course,  a  debatable  question  how  far  an 
isolated  puppy  could  go  in  the  realization  of  a  world.  But 
taking  the  ordinary  puppy  which  grows  up  in  the  society 
of  other  pups  and  dogs  and  people,  the  two  facts  (1)  that 
the  form  of  agency  of  which  it  is  immediately  conscious 
is  mental  rather  than  physical,  and  (2)  that  the  most  inter- 
esting part  of  its  environment  would  be  the  living  beings 
with  which  it  is  associated,  lead  to  the  presumption  that  its 
first  knowledge  of  ejects  would  be  of  the  mental  variety. 
Learning  the  real  agency  of  other  puppies  and  dogs  and  of 
its  master  as  it  grew  older,  its  first  experiences  of  reality 
would  be  of  a  world  of  one  species  of  agency,  that  of  the 
mental  type.  But  as  its  experience  grew  larger  it  would 
be  led  by  the  great  differences  which  arise  between  the 
reactions  of  the  mental  and  the  physical,  to  recognize  a 
distinction  of  type  in  the  causes  that  occasion  them.  The 
recognition  of  the  physical  eject  would  thus  appear  later 
in  the  puppy's  experience  than  would  that  of  the  mental. 
The  dog's  experience  has  been  taken  here  as  a  type 
because  of  its  intimacy  with  the  world  it  moves  in  and 
because  little  suspicion  would  arise  here  of  the  interference 
of  higher  powers  of  reflection.  The  processes  are  all 
functions  of  a  spontaneous  unreflecting  consciousness,  and 
we  have  found  that  the  dog  comes  through  them  to  the 
recognition  of  nearly  all,  if  not  quite  all,  the  essential 
existents  of  the  more  advanced  and  reflective  consciousness. 
The  dog,  it  is  true,  knows  his  objects  straight  out  without 
any  definite  conceptions  of  the  nature  of  what  he  knows. 
Nevertheless,  it  is  a  real  existence  and  not  a  bare  symbol 
which  he  knows,  a  fact  that  is  proved  by  his  definite  and 
appropriate  reactions  upon  the  world.  Taking  the  case  we 
have  analyzed  as  a  type,  let  us  ask,  then,  how  consciousness 
comes  spontaneously  to  know  (1)  self,  (2)  objects  which  are 
symbols  of  the  not-self,  (3)  ejects,  (a)  other  selves,  (b) 
physical  ejects.  How  does  consciousness  spontaneously  know 
self  ?  At  the  very  beginning  of  this  inquiry  we  had  occasion 
to  draw  a  distinction  between  two  species  of  knowledge,  the 


chap.  iv.  THE  WORLD  OF  EXISTENTS.  109 

picturable  and  the  unpicturable,  and  the  knowledge  of  self 
was  classified  with  the  unpicturable  species.  What  we  mean 
by  unpicturable  knowledge  is  the  assurance,  immediate  or 
otherwise,  which  we  have  of  real  existences  which  neverthe- 
less have  no  definable  form  in  which  they  can  be  repre- 
sented, otherwise  than  symbolically,  to  the  imagination. 
Thus,  power,  duty,  love,  hate,  patriotism,  are  realities 
which  we  know  immediately,  but  they  cannot  be  pictured 
and  are  capable  only  of  symbolic  representation. 

The  knowledge  of  self  is  of  this  unpicturable  variety, 
for  while  it  is  true  that  there  are  certain  subjective  cate- 
gories, like  individuality  and  personality,  which  help 
consciousness  to  conceive  the  self  in  specific  ways,  yet  these 
are  not  picturable  categories  and  do  not  represent  the  self 
to  the  imagination  in  any  other  sense  than  it  is  represented 
by  calling  it  loving  or  dutiful.  We  have  seen,  too,  that  the 
knowledge  of  self  is  a  function,  primarily,  of  the  sponta- 
neous consciousness  and  is  possible  below  the  level  of 
reflection.  The  dog  knows  himself,  and  this  serves  him  as 
a  point  of  departure  for  some  very  important  knowledge  of 
the  world.  If  we  ask  what  self  it  is  the  dog  knows, 
we  shall  be  led  by  the  preceding  analysis  to  say  that  it  is 
his  volitional  self;  the  self  of  his  prime  agency;  the  self  of 
that  struggle  of  his  to  realize  his  destiny  in  his  world. 
The  very  singular  circumstance  about  the  affair  is  that  it 
is  not  the  phenomenal  self,  the  subject  of  mere  perception, 
of  which  the  dog  becomes  aware  and  which  guides  him  in 
his  reaction,  but  his  deeper  metaphysical  self ;  the  self  that 
energizes  in  the  efforts  he  puts  forth  for  survival ;  the  self 
of  feeling  and  effort;  the  self  that  experiences  the  storm 
and  stress  of  life.  Through  this  Sturm  unci  Drang,  con- 
sciousness spontaneously  apprehends  itself  in  the  form  of  a 
practical  agent  in  pursuit  of  its  own  well-being.  Its 
experience  is  thus  metaphysical  and  it  knows  itself  as  a 
real  existent  rather  than  as  a  mere  phenomenon.  We  say, 
then,  that  the  self  of  the  spontaneous  consciousness  is 
known    immediately    and   metaphysically.     The    reflective 


HO  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

consciousness  builds  on  the  foundation  of  spontaneity,  and 
though  its  processes  are  mediate  and  its  business  to  trans- 
late its  Avhole  available  material  into  the  idea  or  conception 
of  self,  yet  this  result  of  reflection  carries  with  it  much  of 
the  immediate  force  of  the  spontaneous  intuition.  The 
intimacy  of  the  self-idea  with  the  self-intuition  is  so  per- 
fect that  it  is  only  when  we  compel  ourselves  to  reflect 
critically  that  we  are  able  to  realize  that  the  whole  is  not 
direct  intuition. 

Secondly,  how  do  we  come  to  know  objects  which  are  not 
self?  We  do  little  more  here  than  sum  up  the  results  of 
former  discussion.  The  general  doctrine  maintained 
throughout  this  treatise  is  that  the  cognitive  processes  proper 
do  not  take  the  initiative,  but  are  called  forth  by  the  exigen- 
cies of  the  real  struggle  of  the  agent  for  survival.  The  dog  did 
not  perceive  the  real  tree  or  stone  until  he  ran  against  it  and 
experienced  the  painful  consequences.  His  cognition  of  the 
object  then  unfolded  as  a  symbol  of  a  deeper  reality  fraught 
with  momentous  consequences,  and  its  function  was  to  render 
the  collision  with  the  deeper  reality  avoidable.  A  dog  does 
not  know  all  this,  of  course,  but  it  all  happens  just  in  that 
way.  Recognizing  this  and  calling  the  cognitive  object  which 
arises,  the  phenomenal  object  symbolizing  a  deeper  reality, 
our  concern  here  is  with  this  phenomenal  object.  We  wish 
to  know  how  we  became  aware  of  its  being  a  symbol  of  the 
not-self,  rather  than  a  symbol  of  self.  Now,  it  has  already 
been  pointed  out  how  the  first  definitions  of  the  world 
arise  as  objective  rather  than  subjective,  and  we  have  only 
to  conceive  this  process  as  completing  itself  in  order  to 
reach  a  doctrine  of  objectivity  that  would  be  adequate  to 
refute  subjective  idealism.  For  what  subjective  idealism 
asserts  is  not  simply  that  our  objects  are  bunches  of  per- 
ceptions, but  that  these  perceptions  represent  nothing  but 
modifications  of  consciousness.  If,  however,  they  have 
objective  character  from  the  outset  and  do  not  acquire  it 
somewhere  along  the  road,  it  is  gratuitous  to  maintain  that 
they  represent  nothing  but  modifications  of  consciousness. 


chap.  iv.  THE  WORLD  OF  EXISTENTS.  m 

We  may  not  be  able  to  find  any  objective  existence  which 
they  can  mean,  but  their  pure  objective  character  enjoins 
us  from  the  exclusive  subjective  reference. 

Nevertheless,  while  this  is  a  sufficient  refutation  of 
subjective  idealism,  it  is  not  the  whole  doctrine  of  the 
object.  In  our  experience  the  objectivity  of  the  phe- 
nomenon is  inseparably  bound  up  with  its  symbolic  charac- 
ter. In  calling  the  object  a  phenomenon  we  have  virtually 
called  it  a  symbol,  and  this  connects  its  cognition  with  the 
deeper  world  which  it  symbolizes.  How  does  the  bunch 
of  perceptions  we  call  the  object  come  to  possess  this  sym- 
bolic character?  We  have  already  answered  in  our  analy- 
sis of  the  dog's  experience.  It  acquires  its  symbolic 
character  through  the  mediation  of  the  deeper  experience 
of  the  dog,  connecting  him  with  the  permanent  substances 
or  forces  of  the  world.  It  arises,  as  we  have  seen,  as  a 
perceptual  symbol  of  that  deeper  objective  reality,  and 
this,  in  the  last  analysis,  grounds  its  objectivity  and 
forever  precludes  the  subjective  interpretation.  Let  us 
call  the  phenomenal  object  a  bunch  of  perceptions.  Their 
very  form  as  perceptions  constitutes  their  obvious  ob- 
jective character.  Our  doctrine  of  the  object  completes 
itself  when  we  discover  further  that  this  bunch  of  per- 
ceptions, by  virtue  of  this  objective  character,  stands  as  the 
symbol  of  a  reality  which  is  objective  to  the  deeper  self. 
Now  the  primary  assertion  of  this  is  an  affair  of  the  spon- 
taneous consciousness  and  it  is  on  this  primary  datum  as  a 
basis  that  the  reflective  consciousness  builds  up  its  devel- 
oped affirmation  of  the  objective  world. 

We  pass  now  to  the  consideration  of  ejects  (1)  of  the 
physical  type  and  (2)  other  selves.  The  eject  in  general  is 
not  a  direct  affirmation  of  the  cognitive  consciousness. 
The  cognitive  consciousness  affirms  the  object  directly, 
which,  as  we  saw,  stands  indirectly  as  the  sjnnbol  of  the 
eject.  At  best,  then,  the  eject  is  only  indirectly  asserted 
in  the  consciousness  which  defines  the  object.  It  is  directly 
asserted  only  by  the  metaphysical  consciousness  in  which 


112  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

the  active  self  approaches  its  world  through  its  own  agency. 
This  approach  gives  rise  to  a  metaphysical  reaction,  an 
experience  of  the  frustration  of  agency  which  takes  the 
form  usually  of  a  more  or  less  violent  rebuff.  The  cogni- 
tion, as  we  saw,  develops  as  a  means  of  avoiding  this  rebuff, 
but  the  rebuff  itself  is  related  directly  to  a  metaphysical 
object,  an  eject  which  the  bunch  of  perceptions  only  sym- 
bolizes, but  to  which  the  rebuff  has  a  direct  reference.  I  do 
not  mean  to  say  that  the  dog,  for  example,  has  any  idea  of 
causation,  or  that  he  regards  the  cognized  object  as  merely 
the  symbol  of  a  reality  that  does  not  appear.  What  I  do 
mean  is  that  as  a  hard  fact  it  is  not  tie  cause  of  his  bunch 
of  perceptions  which  the  dog  takes  to  be  real  and  is  afraid 
of.  It  is  rather  the  immediate  cause  of  his  unpleasant 
feelings  when  he  experiences  the  rebuff,  which  he  fears  and 
avoids,  though  he  does  not  clearly  distinguish  it  from  the 
cause  of  his  perceptions.  The  merging  of  distinctions  and 
the  taking  of  the  s3rmbol  as  the  real,  even  when  the  real  is 
all  the  while  meant,  is  a  characteristic  of  the  spontaneous 
consciousness.  The  physical  eject  stands,  then,  as  the 
immediate  cause  of  certain  metaphysical  experiences  of  the 
self.  It  is  unpicturable  except  in  terms  of  its  objective 
symbol,  but  it  is  known  to  exist  as  the  symbolized  cause  of 
certain  experiences  of  the  self. 

Now  the  world  of  physical  science  is  a  world  of  exist- 
ences corresponding  to  these  symbolized  physical  ejects. 
Physics,  as  we  have  seen,  resolves  its  world  into  phenomena 
and  underlying  grounds  or  substances.  The  phenomena 
are  the  symbols  of  the  underlying  substances  or  forces, 
while  these  are  the  hidden  but  uniform  and  stable  forces 
which  are  causally  related  to  the  phenomenal  effects.  They 
are  the  ejects  of  the  physical  world,  and  the  grounds  on 
which  science  holds  them  to  be  necessary  are  identical  with 
the  grounds  on  which  the  reflective  consciousness  asserts 
the  existence  of  physical  ejects.  The  reflective  basis  of 
our  knowledge  here  is  an  inference  which  takes  the  form 
of  the  rationally  necessary.     But  this  inference  rests  on 


chap.  iv.  THE  WORLD  OF  EXISTENTS.  H3 

the  more  intimate  and  direct  certitude  of  the  spontaneous 
consciousness.  That  the  physical  eject  exists  as  real  we 
have  the  united  testimony  of  both  spontaneity  and  reflec- 
tion. The  definition  of  the  character  of  this  ejective 
existence  is  a  matter  of  inference  and  analogy.  To  the  dog 
its  nature  will  express  itself  mainly  in  its  dogged  obstinacy 
in  blocking  his  way.  And  being  but  an  ordinary  dog,  his 
idea  of  the  nature  of  the  cause  of  his  troubles  will  contain 
a  great  many  kyno-morphic  elements,  just  as  that  of  the 
plain  man  will  reveal  elements  which  are  anthropo-morphic. 
It  is  only  in  the  critical  reflection  of  physics  that  we  find 
these  elements  carefully  eliminated  and  the  characteriza- 
tion reduced  to  the  minimum  of  the  necessary.  What, 
then,  does  modern  physics  say  regarding  the  nature  of 
these  physical  ejects?  As  to  their  nature  as  things  in 
themselves,  it  professes  to  know  nothing.  But  in  con- 
nection with  its  scientific  aims  it  is  obliged  to  regard  them 
as  the  ground-causes  of  the  phenomenal  world.  And  while 
it  is  in  a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium  on  the  question 
whether  these  physical  existences  are  to  be  regarded  as 
matter,  force,  ether,  or  something  beyond  its  present 
ken,  there  is  no  uncertainty  as  to  whether  some  ground- 
causes  of  a  physical  character  are  essential;  nor  is  there 
any  doubt  as  to  what  the  most  fundamental  attributes  of 
these  must  be.  If  we  call  them  matter,  we  put  the  empha- 
sis on  persistence,  inertia  and  stability.  If  force,  we  then 
emphasize  agency  and  causal  energy.  If  ether,  we  accent 
the  desideratum  of  a  perfect  medium  for  motion.1  Physics 
thus  defines  its  ejects  in  terms  of  strict  inferential  neces- 
sity, as  persistent  inert  and  stable  substances;  as  mechani- 
cally acting  causes  and  as  perfect  media  for  the  initiation 
and  propagation  of  motions.  And  it  does  this  all  consist- 
ently with  its  general  profession  of  ignorance  as  to  the 

1  If  we  suppose  that  the  hopes  raised  by  the  discovery  of  radium 
and  its  properties  are  to  be  fully  realized  we  have  simply  a  nearer 
approach  by  physics  than  has  hitherto  been  made,  to  that  spring 
of  spontaneity  which  it  has  from  the  first  assumed. 


H4  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

nature  of  things.  For  these  characterizations  are  not  the 
results  of  immediate  insight  into  the  nature  of  the  world, 
but  are  rather  rational  inferences  from  the  world  of  phe- 
nomena regarded,  as  physics  regards  them,  as  symbolizing 
something  deeper  than  themselves. 

We  come  to  the  last  of  our  classes  of  real  existences,  that 
of  ejects  which  are  other  selves.  How  do  we  know  the  real 
existence  of  other  selves?  We  have  already  alluded  to 
Professor  Strong's  reference  of  our  assertion  of  other  selves 
to  an  original  race-instinct  and  we  have  contended  that  an 
instinct  which  merely  registered  repeated  experiences  in  the 
form  of  habit  would  not  be  adequate ;  whereas,  instinct  in 
any  other  sense  would  be  identical  with  some  form  of 
spontaneous  reason.  If  used  in  this  latter  sense  we  have 
no  objection.  The  instinct  which  Professor  Strong  asserts 
would  then  be  the  immediate  causal  reference,  by  the  dog 
in  the  illustration,  of  its  metaphysical  experience  to  a  real 
existence  which  as  a  dog  it  does  not  distinguish  from  the 
bunch  of  perceptions  standing  as  its  symbol  but  which 
nevertheless  means  something  entirely  different  from  that 
symbol.  The  symbol  is  simply  the  object  of  the  dog's  per- 
ceptions, whereas  what  the  dog  cares  for  and  means,  is  the 
thing  which  caused  his  rebuff.  The  experience  as  so  far 
defined  would  be  the  same,  however,  whether  the  rebuffing 
thing  be  a  tree  or  another  dog,  or  a  man.  The  distinction 
of  the  two  species  of  ejects  would  arise  in  connection  with 
a  further  process  of  characterization.  Let  us,  in  view  of 
this,  attempt  a  further  analysis  of  the  dog's  experience. 
We  saw  how  his  idea  of  the  nature  of  the  thing  which 
rebuffed  him  would  be  penetrated  with  kyno-morphic  ele- 
ments which  his  later  experiences  with  physical  things 
would  tend  gradually  to  eliminate.  It  is  highly  probable, 
however,  that  his  first  characterization  would  approximate 
much  more  closely  to  the  nature  of  dogs  than  to  that  of 
trees,  simply  because  the  agent  of  the  experiences  is  a 
dog.  We  here  come  upon  what  Professor  Strong  would 
no  doubt  call  an  original  instinct  of  characterization,  an 


chap.  iv.  THE  WOELD  OF  EXISTENTS.  115 

instinct  the  law  of  which  might  be  stated  as  follows.  It  is 
the  prima rii  impulse  of  every  conscious  agent  to  define  the 
nature  of  other  agents  with  which  it  interacts  in  terms  of 
itself.  A  distinction  between  agents  which  are  rightly  so 
characterized  and  other  agents  of  a  different  kind  will  arise 
when  the  conscious  subject  of  the  experience  has  had 
experiences  of  different  kinds  of  reaction.  In  some  cases 
the  reactions  will  be  substantially  like  the  reactions  the 
agent  himself  is  conscious  of  making,  and  in  these  cases 
the  construction  will  stand.  In  other  cases,  however,  the 
reaction  will  be  different  in  marked  ways  and  will  lead  to 
a  modification  of  the  original  construction.  Even  an  ordi- 
nary dog  learns  to  distinguish  between  inanimate  and 
animate  things,  and  the  human  consciousness  will  be  capa- 
ble of  carrying  this  distinction  much  further. 

The  knowledge  of  the  real  existence  of  other  selves  is 
thus  deeply  grounded  in  the  immediate  processes  of  the 
spontaneous  consciousness.  Proceeding  on  the  foundation 
thus  given,  reflection  develops  the  latent  implications  of 
spontaneity  and  draws  out  inferentially  the  idea  of  self. 
This  idea,  it  is  true,  is  largely  the  product  of  reflection,  but 
the  data  of  the  reflective  judgment  are  found  in  the  spon- 
taneous consciousness.  It  would  not  be  an  abuse  of  words 
to  say  that  these  data  are  the  products  of  spontaneous 
inference.  They  are,  moreover,  so  immediate  and  so  impli- 
cated in  the  very  foundations  of  our  experience  that  to 
deny  their  validity  would  be  almost  tantamount  to  rooting 
up  the  foundations  of  the  world. 

Now  we  have  seen  that  ejects  are  metaphysical  reals. 
They  are  the  terms  into  which  the  world  of  existences 
resolve  when  they  are  regarded  as  a  system  of  agents  exer- 
cising causal  efficiency.  We  have  learned,  however,  that 
metaphysics  cannot  stop  with  the  notion  of  a  plurality  of 
world-causes  as  a  final  conception  of  reality.  The  world 
of  existents  could  not  achieve  either  unity  or  stability  if 
the  last  terms  in  it  were  discrete  and  plural.  We  may 
postulate  a  plurality  of  idea-forces  in  the  world  and  it  will 


116  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

be  of  no  avail  so  long  as  Ave  confine  the  outlook  of  each  to 
its  own  movements.  This  difficulty  will  be  only  partially  met 
by  the  notion  of  a  plurality  of  forces  which  are  able  to  take 
cognizance  of  their  inter-relations.  The  real  unity  of  the 
world  can  be  achieved  only  in  some  world-insight  which 
tahi  s  thought  for  the  whole.  On  this  universally  valid  meta- 
physical principle,  then,  that  final  meanings  must  be 
interpreted  in  terms  of  prevision  and  idea-purpose,  the 
judgment  is  reached  that  the  grounding  of  individual 
forces  and  agents  in  some  principle  of  unification  as  a 
whole  so  that  our  world  may  in  a  real  sense  be  one  world, 
points  by  direct  necessary  implication  to  some  unitary 
spring  of  prevision  and  purpose  from  which  the  existence 
and  reality  of  the  world  as  a  whole  may  be  intended  and 
realized.  This  is  the  metaplrysical  case  for  an  absolute. 
The  whole  strength  of  the  link  that  binds  our  consciousness 
to  an  absolute  will  be  appreciated,  however,  only  when  we 
correlate  the  dictum  of  reflection  with  that  of  spontaneity. 
The  correspondent  of  the  absolute  in  the  spontaneous  ex- 
perience of  the  man,  and  perhaps  of  the  dog,  is  to  be  found 
in  the  religious  consciousness  which  relates  the  man  or  the 
dog  in  apparent  immediacy  to  some  awful  and  mysterious 
power  which  becomes  partially  intelligible  to  him  through 
the  analogies  of  his  own  being,  but  also  looms  transcen- 
dently  beyond  the  limits  of  his  conceptions.  The  God  of  the 
savage,  as  well  as  of  the  civilized  man,  is  a  being  of  this 
kind,  grasped  in  what  Professor  Strong  would  call  a  pri- 
mary instinct,  and  in  what  we  have  preferred  to  construe 
as  a  spontaneous  metaphysical  inference  of  the  causal 
species.  I  mean  metaphysical  causation,  of  course;  the 
operation  of  that  agency  in  the  world  which  brings  its  deeper 
reality  to  light.  It  is  not  probable  that  the  savage  or  the 
civilized  man  would  locate  a  transcendent  power  in  the 
world,  if  his  experience  had  not  made  him  aware  of  effects 
which  he  found  himself  unable  to  ascribe  to  ordinary 
agencies.  He  must  feel  himself  in  presence  of  a  causality 
that    looms   beyond   the    furthest   reach    of   the    ordinary 


chap.  iv.  THE  WOKLD  OF  EXISTENTS.  117 

causes  he  knows  before  he  can  have  the  impulse  to  put  a 
religious  construction  on  his  experience.  The  religious 
consciousness  of  the  dog,  so  far  as  he  may  be  said  to  have 
any,  will  develop  out  of  his  relations  with  his  master,  in 
whom  he  will  find  along  with  much  that  is  akin  to  himself, 
a  mysteriously  transcending  power  of  compassing  results 
that  is  baffling  to  his  highest  intelligence,  while  the  results 
themselves  will  be  only  partially  intelligible.  That  the 
dog  regards  his  master  as  a  transcendent  being  exercising 
an  agency  that  is  largely  mysterious  and  incomprehensible, 
and  that  his  feeling  toward  his  master  is  akin  to  relig- 
ious in  its  type,  there  is  little  reason  to  doubt. 

Combining  the  spontaneous  link  with  that  of  the 
reflective  consciousness,  and  identifying  the  God  of  the 
rationally  developed  and  reflective  religious  consciousness 
with  the  absolute  of  metaphysics,  the  reason  will  be 
apparent  for  that  intimacy  of  relationship  with  God  which 
the  normal  human  being  feels  and  which  precludes  him 
from  translating  his  assurance  into  terms  of  inference 
merely.  Just  as  he  declines  to  hold  the  existence  of  other 
minds  on  terms  of  mere  inference  and  seeks  grounds  for  it 
in  the  depths  of  his  spontaneous  experience,  so  here  he  is 
not  satisfied  with  the  effort  to  translate  assurance  of  God 
into  threads  of  logical  inference  but,  following  a  profound 
impulse,  seeks  in  the  depths  of  his  metaphysical  interac- 
tions with  the  real  world  for  the  secret  of  that  assurance. 
And  we  do  not  doubt  that  the  leading  has  in  it  more  than 
the  mere  blind  reaction  of  habit. 

We  have  seen  that  existents  may  be  classified  under 
several  heads  as  follows:  (1)  the  self  or  the  subject  which 
knows  and  experiences  its  world,  (2)  objects  of  perception 
which  we  call  phenomenal  existents  and  which  are  taken  to 
be  symbols  of  deeper  and  more  real  existents  called  ejects. 
These  are  further  distinguishable  as  physical  and  mental 
ejects,  the  former  constituting  the  stable  substances  or 
forces  of  the  physical  world  which  are  connected  with  the 
symbolizing  phenomena  as  their  causes,  while  the  latter  are 


US  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

other  selves  with  which  the  subject  self  becomes  acquainted 
through  the  combined  activities  of  its  spontaneous  and 
reflective  consciousness.  Lastly,  there  is  the  great  eject 
which  we  call  God  or  the  absolute,  in  which  the  system  of 
existent s  culminates  and  which  stands  related  to  the  world 
of  existents  as  the  metaphysical  spring  of  their  stability 
and  unity. 


CHAPTER  V. 

PEIMAKY   GEETITUDE. 

In  discussing  the  topic  of  this  chapter  it  is  important 
that  a  distinction  be  recognized  at  the  outset  between 
what  may  be  called  primary  certitude  and  the  species  of 
certitude  which  pertains  to  validity.1  For  we  may  discover 
in  some  cases  that  what  is  certain  in  the  primary  sense  may 
not  prove  to  be  valid,  and  on  the  other  hand  that  some 
things  not  primarily  certain  may  be  proved  to  be  valid. 
We  are  interested  here  mainly  in  the  primary  tenure  of 
our  judgments.  Eegarding  primary  certitude  we  have  to 
consider  its  species  and  the  forms  in  which  they  embody 
themselves;  or,  stated  differently,  the  kind  of  tenure  by 
which  they  hold  their  content  of  reality.  The  most  funda- 
mental line  of  cleavage  arising  in  the  department  of 
certitude  is  that  which  separates  knowledge  from  belief. 
It  is  well-known  that  many  of  our  judgments,  even  of 
those  that  are  most  certain,  do  not  rest  on  a  basis  of  full 
cognitive  evidence.  Such  judgments  will  be  either  in- 
stinctive, expressing  a  certitude  founded  on  habit  and 
repetition,  or  they  will  be  judgments  of  belief.  Let  us 
neglect  for  the  present  the  instinctive  judgment  for  the 
sake  of  the  judgment  of  belief,  which  we  shall  proceed 
to  analyze.  The  supposition,  which  is  widely  current,  that 
the   belief-judgment   as    such   differs   from   the   cognitive 

xThe    discussion    here   is   confined   mainly  to    primary   certitude, 
validity  being  only  indirectly  and  incidentally  dealt  with. 

119 


120  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

judgment  only  in  degree,  is  at  least  doubtful.  There  is  a 
qualitative  difference  in  the  data  of  a  belief -judgment  which 
constitutes  a  difference  of  kind  between  it  and  the  cog- 
nitive species.  In  another  work  more  detailed  considera- 
tion has  been  given  to  the  distinction  between  knowledge 
and  belief1  and  the  conclusions  there  reached  will  to  some 
extent  lighten  the  task  of  the  present  discussion. 

We  made  the  point  in  that  work  that  there  is  an  im- 
portant qualitative  difference  between  the  two  species, 
consisting  in  the  larger  part  which  is  played  in  the  belief- 
judgment  by  the  will.  A  belief -judgment  on  its  subjective 
side  carries  with  it,  as  we  saw,  the  consciousness  of  having 
been  determined,  to  some  degree  at  least,  by  considerations 
of  practical  interest  or  value;  so  that  there  will  always  be 
a  point  of  view  from  which  the  believer  will  be  aware  of 
asserting  his  truth  because  of  its  relation  to  some  good. 
In  short,  whatever  cognitive  data  may  be  available,  a  belief- 
judgment  Avill  persist  as  a  belief-judgment  so  long  as  the 
determining  consideration  in  asserting  it  is  one  that  arises 
in  view  of  its  practical  value.  Moreover,  this  subjective 
difference  points  to  an  important  distinction  of  an  objective 
character.  The  fact  that  our  judgment  rests  partly  on 
practical  data  indicates  a  deficiency  in  its  theoretic  basis. 
The  cognitive,  or  as  we  shall  call  it,  the  theoretic  judgment, 
rests  in  the  last  analysis,  on  grounds  of  immediate  appre- 
hension, or,  on  those  of  rational  necessity,  and  it  is  by  virtue 
of  the  immediate  basis  to  which  it  is  reducible  that  the 
theoretic  judgment  asserts  itself  with  coercive  authority, 
leaving  to  the  mind  no  option  but  to  accept.  The  judg- 
ment of  belief  is  lacking  in  this  objective  necessity  and  we 
are  always  conscious  of  being  left  the  option  to  dispute  it, 
or  at  least  to  withhold  our  assent  from  it,  and  this  option 
will  be  found  to  survive  even  in  connection  with  the 
strongest  assurance  of  the  truth  of  our  belief.  The  judg- 
ment of  belief  may  be  defined,  then,  as  one  that  in  the  last 

1  See  Foundations  of  Knowledge — Chap.     Knowledge  and  Belief. 


chap.v.  PRIMARY  CERTITUDE.  121 

analysis  is  determined  by  practical  rather  than  by  theoretic 
considerations;  whereas,  a  theoretic  judgment  is  definable 
as  one  that  rests,  in  the  last  analysis,  on  immediate  appre- 
hension or  objective  rational  necessity.  We  do  not  mean 
here  to  exclude  theoretic  considerations  from  judgments  of 
belief,  or  practical  considerations  from  theoretic  judgments. 
The  point  of  our  contention  is  simply  this,  that  when  we 
come  down  to  the  determining  motive,  the  "holding  turn" 
so  to  speak,  we  find  that  in  the  case  of  the  belief -judgment, 
it  is  practical,  while,  in  the  case  of  the  cognitive  judgment, 
it  is  theoretic.1 

Taking  this  distinction  between  theoretic  judgments 
and  belief -judgments  as  representing  a  fundamental  line 
of  cleavage,  the  problem  of  species  of  primary  certitude 
resolves  itself  into  that  of  the  different  kinds  of  assertion 
which  arise  under  the  two  species,  theoretic  judgments  and 
judgments  of  belief.  Assuming,  then,  that  the  character- 
istic feature  of  a  theoretic  judgment  as  distinguished  from 
a  judgment  of  belief  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  the 
balance  in  favor  of  assertion  is  turned,  in  its  case,  by  a 
theoretic  rather  than  a  practical  motive  or  interest,  we  are 
in  a  position  to  deal  rationally  with  the  question  of  the 
various  species  of  certitude  which  arise  and  are  germane, 
(1)  to  natural  science,  (2)  to  metaphysics.  In  the  field 
of  natural  science,  inasmuch  as  its  method  is  purely 
objective  and  involves  the  indifference  of  the  world  it  deals 
with  to  the  nature  or  interest  of  the  observer,  we  shall  be 
prepared  to  find  that  the  theoretic  is  the  only  species  of 
judgment  it  can  accept  as  legitimate,  while  all  affirmations 
of  belief  must,  as  such,  be  rigidly  excluded.  We  do  not 
mean  that  the  scientific  investigator  may  not  entertain 
judgments  of  belief,  or  that  these  may  not  be  found  valua- 
ble sometimes  as  suggesting  fruitful  lines  of  inquiry.     We 

1  For  cognitive  we  might  substitute  the  term  theoretic,  while  for 
the  belief  judgment  may  be  substituted,  judgment  of  value.  The 
distinction  turns  substantially  on  the  difference  between  theoretic 
considerations  and  considerations  of  value. 


122  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

only  mean  that  a  judgment  will  not  possess  scientific  value 
unless  its  determining  considerations  be  theoretic.  Exclud- 
ing the  belief-judgment,  then,  we  have  left  the  theoretic 
form  as  alone  possessing  scientific  value.  The  certitude 
of  this  species  of  judgment  is  traceable,  in  the  last  analysis, 
as  we  saw,  to  a  basis  of  either  cognition  or  rational  neces- 
sity. Let  us  classify  the  theoretic  judgments,  then,  into 
two  groups,  judgments  of  cognition  and  judgments  of 
rational  necessity.  The  cognitive  species  will  be  found  to 
rise  out  of  data  of  immediate  apprehension  and  may  be 
called  intuitive,  while  to  the  judgment  of  objective  neces- 
sity we  may  apply  the  term  rational. 

AYhat,  then,  are  the  forms  of  certitude  which  arise  in 
connection  with  these  species  of  judgment  ?  The  intuitive 
judgment  is  one  that  will  be  found  to  cover  the  fields  of 
mathematics  and  the  purely  empirical  processes  of  physical 
science.  We  have  called  the  judgment  intuitive,  a  designa- 
tion which  will  require  some  explanation.  We  call  that 
intuitive  ivhich  is  immediately  present  in  consciousness, 
ivltctlier  in  the  form  of  perception  or  conception.  The 
object  of  perceptual  apprehension  is,  of  course,  the  ob- 
served fact,  and  a  judgment  founded  on  perception  may, 
therefore,  be  called  factual.  The  object  of  a  conception  is 
not  ordinarily  called  a  fact  since  the  conceptual  function 
is  more  active  than  that  of  perception.  Let  us  for  the 
sake  of  distinction  call  the  conceptual  equivalent  of  the 
fact  a  construct.  The  judgment  which  is  affirmed  on  con- 
ceptual data  may  then  be  called  constructual.  Intuitive 
judgments  thus  resolve  themselves  into  the  two  sub-species 
factual  and  constructual.  And  ranging  the  species  in 
order,  we  arrive  at  the  trinity  of  judgment  forms,  factual, 
constructual,  and  rational. 

Now  a  strict  observance  of  the  order  of  experience 
would  no  doubt  give  the  factual  judgment  precedence  in 
this  discussion.  But  the  fact  that  we  have  already  divided 
our  world  of  knowledge  into  mathematics,  physical  science 
and   metaphysics   determines   the   question   of   priority   in 


chap.  v.  PRIMARY  CERTITUDE.  123 

favor  of  the  judgment  of  mathematics.  What  species  of 
certitude  are  we  concerned  with,  then,  in  mathematics? 
Those  who,  like  Hume,  attempt  to  ground  mathematics 
exclusively  in  perception  would  answer,  the  factual.  But 
this  reply  would  meet  a  formidable  obstacle  in  the  fact  that 
the  mathematician  never  makes  his  direct  appeal  to  facts 
of  perception  at  all.  His  diagrams  and  figures  are  symbols 
which  represent  approximations  but  never  exactly  the 
thing  symbolized,  which  is  a  conceived  angle,  straight  line, 
curve  or  dimension.  His  numbers  do,  of  course,  exactly 
express  the  things  they  are  meant  to  represent,  but  the 
objects  of  number  are  conceptual  and  not  perceptual. 
The  immediate  terms  of  mathematics  to  which  direct  appeal 
is  made  are  constructs  rather  than  facts  of  perception. 
The  mathematical  judgment  is  reducible,  therefore,  to  a 
basis  of  intuition  proper,  rather  than  to  one  of  fact.  It  is 
the  intuitive  type  of  judgment  par  excellence.  Bearing  in 
mind  now  that  the  intuitive  is  the  immediately  present 
either  in  perception  or  conception,  and  that  the  immed- 
iately present  in  conception  is  a  construct  rather  than  a 
simple  fact,  we  are  ready  for  the  conclusion  that  the  cer- 
titude of  mathematics  is  of  the  species  we  have  called 
constructual.  It  is  a  certitude  which  arises  in  the  first 
instance  in  connection  with  those  elementary  concepts  of 
mathematics  which  embody  for  the  science  its  notions  of 
lines,  points,  dimensions,  and  numbers.  These  are  the 
data  used  in  its  definitions  and  axioms;  a  definition 
being  simply  a  formula  that  states  the  way  in  which  the 
mathematical  imagination  would  conceive  (ideally  draw) 
the  term  in  question,  while  an  axiom  is  a  statement  of  the 
most  obvious  relations  which  arise  out  of  a  comparison  of 
the  definable  terms.  It  appears,  then,  that  whatever  the 
Humian  may  say  as  to  the  first  data  of  mathematics,  the 
fact  is  not  to  be  disputed  that  the  mathematician  never 
makes  his  direct  appeal  to  data  of  perception,  but  always 
to  data  of  conception.  Lest  this  position  should  be  still 
regarded  as  disputable  let  us  consider  further  the  nature 


124  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

of  the  mathematician's  data.  We  have  seen  that  he  deals 
with  points,  lines,  angles,  curves  and  numbers.  But  the 
reduction  of  any  of  these  terms  to  perceptions  destroys 
their  mathematical  character,  for  no  one  ever  had  a  per- 
cept of  any  of  these  terms  which  corresponded  exactly  to  the 
definition.  The  straight  line  is  found  not  to  be  straight; 
the  angle  is  not  a  perfect  angle  and  the  point  is  found  to 
fill  up  a  lot  of  space.  The  perceptions  in  mathematics  are 
clearly  not  the  terms  themselves,  but  symbols  of  them  and 
symbols  in  a  very  peculiar  sense.  The  perception  in  phys- 
ics symbolizes  a  deeper  and  causal  reality,  but  cause  does 
not  enter  the  field  of  mathematical  conceptions.  The 
determining  category  is  that  of  equivalence.  Now  the 
perception  in  mathematics  is  a  symbol  of  equivalence. 
How  can  this  be?  Clearly  by  manifesting  the  character 
of  approximation.  Mathematical  symbols  owe  their  sym- 
bolic character  to  the  fact  that  they  are  approximations  in 
the  perceptual  world  to  exact  quantities  which  cannot  be 
perceived.  These  quantities  are  conceived,  that  is,  men- 
tally drawn,  in  a  conceived  medium,  and  it  is  these  mental 
products  which  are  roughly  draughted  out  and  symbolized 
in  perceptions.  The  mathematician  knows  that  his  per- 
ceptions will  mislead  him  if  he  takes  them  for  anything  but 
approximations  to  his  real  data,  which  were  never  on 
sea  or  land.  The  basis  of  mathematical  certitude  will  be 
found  then,  not  in  factual,  but  rather  in  constructuai 
intuition.  The  primal  certitude  arises  out  of  the  fact  that 
the  mathematician  conceives  his  primary  terms  in  their 
immediacy.  Now  I  conceive  that  it  was  this  form  of  con- 
structuai intuition  which  Kant  called  pure  intuition  and 
which  he  laid  at  the  foundations  of  mathematics,  only  Kant 
did  not  distinguish  this  clearly  from  perception.  Kightly 
enough,  we  think,  he  regarded  space  and  time  as  forms  of 
perception,  but  as  such  they  are  not  as  yet  the  pure  intui- 
tions of  mathematics.  The  space  and  time  of  perception 
are  plural  and  fragmentary  though  homogeneous,  and  it  is 
no  doubt  to  their   homogeneity  that   is   due   the   falling 


chap.  v.  PRIMARY  CERTITUDE.  125 

together  of  the  fragmentary  spaces  and  times  into  a  seam- 
less continuum.  But  this  seamless  continuum  is  not  yet  a 
pure  intuition.  The  pure  intuition  is  a  notion  of  exact 
quantity  and  it  already  has  the  prerogative  of  a  rational 
universal;  it  dictates  the  form  to  perception.  Why  should 
perceptual  space  and  time  be  clothed  with  this  preroga- 
tive? Clearly  in  space  and  time  perceptions  it  would  be  a 
great  impertinence  and  the  empiricists  would  be  right  in 
indignantly  driving  it  away.  Pure  intuition  is  already 
space  and  time  mentally  constructed  and  therefore  ideally 
exact  and  in  a  position  to  dictate  the  law  to  perception. 
In  short,  in  saying  that  mathematics  rests  on  data  of  pure 
intuition,  Kant  concedes  that  it  rests  on  conceptual  data. 
In  reaching  this  conclusion  we  have  advanced  a  long 
way  toward  the  determination  of  the  nature  of  mathe- 
matical certitude.  It  is  a  certitude  which  springs  primarily 
from  pure  concepts  of  quantity.  Such  certitude  is  im- 
mediate because  it  arises  directly  out  of  the  terms  them- 
selves, which  the  mathematican  uses,  and  has  no  ulterior 
reference.  And  its  character  as  indefectible  or  apodictic 
certitude  is  due  to  the  nature  of  these  terms.  They  are 
absolutely  exact  and  invariable.  What  is  seen  to  be  true 
about  them  is  seen,  therefore,  to  be  absolutely  and  invari- 
ably true.  In  mathematics  there  is  no  variableness  or 
shadow  of  turning.  Now,  these  original  constructual  data 
are  the  correspondents  of  facts  in  the  physical  sciences. 
Physics  generalizes  the  phenomena  presented  in  perception 
by  means  of  the  recurrence  of  the  same  among  diff  events. 
What,  then,  will  be  the  equivalent  of  physical  generaliza- 
tion in  mathematics  ?  Plainly  enough  those  results  beyond 
the  field  of  immediate  data,  which  are  obtained  by  a  compar- 
ison of  intuitions.  This  comparison  is  made  possible  by 
the  mediate  use  of  exact  equivalents  which  give  the  intui- 
tion of  two  quantities  as  exactly  equal  to  the  mediating 
quantity.  This  comparison  leads  from  the  step  of  intui- 
tion to  that  of  infevence.  That  these  quantities  are  exactly 
equal  to  each  other  is  not  an  intuition ;  it  is  not  immediate- 


126  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

ly  obvious,  but  it  is  an  absolutely  exact  and  invariable  in- 
ference. 

We  have  here  come  upon  the  type  of  ordinary  mathe- 
matical reasoning  which  will  be  found  reducible  in  all 
cases  to  this  form  of  inference.  The  exact  equivalence  of 
quantities  to  a  given  quantity  leads  to  two  intuitions  and 
the  comparison  of  these  intuitions  leads  to  a  different  kind 
of  a  step  which  we  call  inference.  Having  found  that  the 
species  of  certitude  we  call  mathematical  springs  from  the 
exactness  and  invariableness  of  the  terms  used,  we  find  that 
the  same  thing  holds  true  of  mathematical  inference.  It  is 
a  conclusion  founded  on  the  comparison  of  terms  of  exact 
equivalence,  and  hence,  it  carries  with  it  absolute  certainty. 
We  cannot  call  a  conclusion  of  this  sort  one  of  rational  ne- 
cessity. For  while  it  is  no  doubt  necessary  in  the  highest 
degree,  this  quality  springs  directly  out  of  what  we  may 
call  an  intuition  of  the  equivalence  of  relations.  We  do 
not  say  that  the  exact  quantitative  equivalents  of  a  third 
exact  quantity  must  be  equal  to  each  other;  we  say  that 
they  are  equal  to  each  other,  and  this  because  the  inference 
is  one  that  rests  directly  on  the  equivalence  of  intuitions. 
The  question  whether  any  other  species  of  certitude  arises 
in  the  field  of  mathematical  judgments  is  one  the  answer 
to  which  depends  on  the  prior  question  as  to  whether  the 
direct  and  mediate  intuition  of  equivalence  exhausts  the 
possibilities  of  mathematical  calculation.  This  we  do  not 
believe,  for  is  there  not  a  whole  field  of  genuine  mathemat- 
ical calculation  in  which  results  are  reached  by  taking  the 
terms  of  one  kind  of  quantity  as  symbols  of  approximation 
for  reaching  judgments  about  another  quantity  of  a  differ- 
ent kind?  This  process  will  enter  wherever  the  relation 
is  one  between  a  finite  and  an  infinite  quantity.  Between 
the  notion  of  the  finite  and  that  of  the  infinite  there  is  a  dif- 
ference of  quality,  since  the  finite  is  always  greater  than  any 
of  its  parts  and  equal  to  the  sum  of  its  parts,  whereas  any 
of  the  parts  of  the  infinite  may  be  as  infinite  as  the  whole. 
In  calculating  an  infinite  series,  however,  the  only  method 


chap.  v.  PRIMARY  CERTl'lV  1)10.  L27 

possible  is  to  ignore  this  difference  of  quality  and  employ 
in  connection  with  a  finite  process  a  quantity  which 
stands  as  a  symbol  of  approximation.  Let  it  be  supposed, 
then,  that  the  finite  process  has  gone  on  to  n  terms ;  we  may 
represent  the  next  step  under  the  symbol  x  as  the  point 
of  vanishment  where  the  distance  between  the  finite  and 
the  infinite  disappears.  Now  this  does  not  reduce  the 
judgment  in  which  it  is  asserted  to  either  direct  or  indirect 
intuition.  But  it  carries  with  it  the  certitude  of  the  highest 
type  of  inference.  The  whole  certitude  of  mathematics 
rests,  therefore,  on  a  basis  of  conceptual  intuition. 

The  primary  certitude  of  physical  science  is  factual. 
It  arises  out  of  the  fact  that  a  physical  process  starts  with 
the  immediacy  of  perception.  The  phenomena  that  con- 
stitute its  data  are  bunches  of  perceptions.  Out  of  these 
science  selects  its  recurrent  terms  and  on  them  bases  its 
generalizations.  In  this  part  of  the  process  of  science  the 
aim  is  to  discover  the  real  uniformities  among  indefinite 
differences.  All  phenomena  may  be  translated  into  dy- 
namic terms  of  motion.  Generalization  lays  hold  of 
motions  which  are  uniform  and  states  the  law  of  their  uni- 
formity. Thus  if  it  be  found  that  iron-filings  behave  in  a 
uniformly  opposite  manner  when  exposed  to  the  positive 
or  negative  pole  of  a  magnet  this  conduct  will  be  statable  in 
terms  of  a  general  proposition  which  in  science  is  called  a 
law.  Now  the  certitude  of  these  general  propositions  is 
still  factual  inasmuch  as  it  is  an  observed  uniformity  in 
the  behavior  of  facts  which  the  proposition  embodies. 
Factual  certitude  arises  out  of  the  immediate  presence  of 
the  factual  data  in  consciousness.  We  have  seen  that  the 
objects  of  physical  investigation  resolve  themselves  into 
phenomena  of  this  immediate  kind.  But  the  objects  of 
science,  the  terms  given  in  bunches  of  perceptions,  are 
symbols  of  something  deeper  which  does  not  immediately 
appear.  The  phenomena  are  everywhere  connected  with 
underlying  substances  or  forces  of  which  they  are  conceived 
to  be  effects.     And  we  have  seen   that  science  does  not 


128  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

become  completely  rational  until  it  has  grounded  its  phe- 
nomena in  these  deeper  realities.  But,  the  factual  certi- 
tude of  the  symbol  does  not  extend  to  the  thing  symbolized. 
Like  the  terms  of  mathematics  these  deeper  realities  never 
appear  in  the  immediacy  of  perception.  Nor  yet  do  they 
appear  as  conceptual  intuitions.  On  what  tenure,  then, 
are  they  asserted?  On  grounds  of  rational  necessity,  but 
a  necessity  of  a  peculiar  kind.  The  assurance  of  phys- 
ics rests  in  part  on  the  necessity  that  its  phenomena 
shall  be  stably  grounded.  This  is  a  necessity  of  reflection 
and  expresses  a  fundamental  demand  for  rationality.  But 
this  is  not  all.  We  have  seen  how  the  reflective  demands 
for  an  absolute  are  strengthened  by  data  from  the  spon- 
taneous consciousness,  and  here  the  situation  is  substan- 
tially the  same.  The  dynamic  experience  of  conscious 
agency  brings  to  light  the  eject,  or  real  object,  of  the  phys- 
ical type,  and  it  is  to  this  eject  that  science  pins  her  faith. 
The  phenomena  of  the  world  are  symbolic  effects  of  deeper 
realities  which  are  connected  with  them  by  the  relation  of 
natural  causation.  This  means  that  the  world  of  physical 
realities  is  a  world  of  causes  and  that  phenomena  are 
related  to  these  as  effects  to  underlying  causes.  Now  the 
nerve  of  causation  in  general  is  found  in  the  requirement 
that  the  world  of  changes  or  happenings,  which  is  a  world 
of  effects,  shall  be  connected  with  a  world  of  agency  or 
agencies  as  the  necessary  spring  of  its  existence.  This  is 
an  altogether  primary  form  of  necessity,  not  derivable 
from  anything  more  ultimate  than  itself,  but  standing  in 
its  own  right.  Into  the  texture  of  physical  science,  then, 
there  enter  two  different  species  of  certitude,  the  one 
factual  securing  the  first  data  in  the  certitude  of  sensible 
intuition.  But  the  law  of  science  in  the  deeper  sense,  as 
Mill  has  demonstratively  shown,  is  not  a  mere  formula  of 
sensible  intuition.  The  sensible  world  is  the  phenomenon 
of  a  deeper  world  of  physical  realities  which  it  symbolizes 
but  does  not  characterize.  The  certitude  of  this  deeper 
world  is  one  of  rational  necessity,  and  the  certitude  of 


chap.  v.  PRIMAEY  CERTITUDE.  129 

physics,  in  so  far  as  its  processes  include  the  deeper  reali- 
ties, is  one  of  rational  necessity.  It  is  not  Intuitively 
revealed  that  the  sensible  world  is  a  symbolic  world  or  that 
its  symbols  point  to  deeper  physical  realities,  but  it  is  none 
the  less  certain  that  this  is  true,  since  the  link  which  binds 
the  symbol  to  the  symbolized  is  as  primary  as  intuition 
itself. 

Beyond  mathematics  and  physical  science  what  certi- 
tude1 is  left  for  metaphysics?  The  answer  can  be  found 
only  by  investigating  the  kind  of  objects  and  processes 
with  which  the  metaphysician  deals.  Now  we  have  found 
that  physics  deals  with  realities  which  lie  deeper  than  the 
sensible  world  and  which  the  sensible  world  only  sym- 
bolizes. This  assertion  of  the  deeper  realities,  the  physical 
ejects,  which  is  so  fundamental  in  science,  might  be  re- 
garded as  a  metaphysical  element  in  science.  Neverthe- 
less, we  prefer  here  to  regard  it  rather  as  a  common  ground 
or  meeting  point  for  both  physics  and  metaphysics.  We 
have  seen  already  that  the  point  in  the  physical  conception 
of  the  world  on  which  metaphysics  lays  hold  in  order  to 
effect  its  own  transformation,  is  its  notion  of  a  ground  of 
phenomena,  its  doctrine  of  underlying  substances  or  forces. 
We  may  take  this  notion  of  ground  which  physics  construes 
in  terms  of  the  physical  eject  as  supplying  at  the  same  time 
the  terminus  of  physics  and  the  point  of  departure  for 
metaphysics.  We  may  ask,  then,  where  metaphysics  ob- 
tains the  additional  insight  which  makes  this  departure 
possible.  And  the  answer  will  be,  (1)  in  the  mental  ejects, 
the  real  existence  of  which  it  finds  reason  to  assert,  and 
(2)  as  its  most  important  and  primary  source,  in  the  self 
of  the  deeper  metaphysical  experience.  That  we  have 
grounds  for  asserting  the  real  existence  of  mental  ejects 
has  already  been  concluded.  The  deeper  world  thus  con- 
tains two  kinds  of  existents,  physical  and  mental  ejects, 
and  the  metaphysical  problem  arises  directly  as  the  ques- 
tion of  their  relation.  Physics  will  tolerate  no  mental 
interference  with  its  physical  agents  and  its  right  in  this 
9 


130  ANALYSIS.  part  I. 

must  be  admitted.  But  conceding  this,  the  menial  type  of 
agency  suggests  the  question  whether  we  have  not  here 
the  norm  of  a  more  ultimate  conception  of  things  than  that 
on  which  physics  proceeds.  Out  of  this  hint  arises  the 
whole  endeavor  of  metaphysics.  But  as  we  have  seen, 
mental  ejects  are  partly  analogies  of  the  self-agency  which 
we  know  directly  in  our  own  conscious  experience.  Our 
starting-point  for  the  assertion  of  their  existence  is  found 
in  the  consciousness  of  our  own  agency,  and  the  ground- 
certitude  of  metaphysics  will  be  to  seek,  therefore,  in  the 
certitude  of  self -existence.  In  regard  to  this,  if  we  observe 
the  distinction  between  picturable  and  imp ictur able  exist- 
ence and  do  not  fall  into  the  mistake  of  denying  that  the 
unpicturable  is  knowable,  it  will  be  clear  that  the  tenure 
on  which  we  hold  the  existence  of  our  metaphysical  self 
is  one  of  our  primary  certitudes.  And  since  it  has  the 
immediacy  of  intuition  we  may  call  it  unpicturable  intui- 
tion. It  has  in  it  something  like  the  immediate  touch  of 
sensation  and  like  sense-intuition  it  is  not  resolvable  into 
anything  more  simple  than  itself. 

I  am  not  speaking  here  of  the  bare  existence  of  self,  but 
rather  of  its  concrete  existence :  that  self-agency  as  a  con- 
crete fact  of  which  we  are  immediately  aware  in  terms  of 
the  inner  consciousness.  The  certitude  of  the  existence  of 
the  metaphysical  self  is  equal,  then,  to  any  form  of  certi- 
tude; it  exhibits  the  immediacy  and  the  coercive  force  of 
intuition  and  may  be  ranked  as  a  certitude  of  the  intui- 
tive species.  The  first  certitude  on  which  metaphysics 
rests  is,  therefore,  our  certitude  as  to  the  real  existence 
of  self-agents  in  the  world.  We  have  intuitive  certainty 
regarding  our  own  self-agency;  while  regarding  other 
selves  we  have  a  certitude  equal  to  that  of  physics  in  regard 
to  physical  agents.  We  might  say  stronger,  since  self- 
agency  is  the  only  form  of  agency  which  we  immediately 
know,  and  science  only  reaches  its  physical  agents  by 
stripping  off  some  of  the  attributes  of  self-agency  while 
others   are   suffered   to   remain.     This   basal   certitude   of 


chap.v.  PEIMAEY  CERTITUDE.  131 

metaphysics  regarding  the  real  existence  of  its  type  of 
being  is  even  greater,  then,  than  that  of  physics  regard- 
ing the  world  of  physical  existences. 

But  metaphysics  does  more  than  assert  the  real  exist- 
ence of  mental  agents  in  the  world.  It  takes  its  most  char- 
acteristic step  in  asserting  that  the  final  meaning  of  the 
world  will  be  determined  only  when  it  is  interpreted  in 
terms  of  agency  of  the  mental  rather  than  of  the  physical 
type.  And  this  leads  to  the  final  category  under  which 
metaphysics  conceives  the  world,  that  of  idea  and  reality. 
What  kind  of  certitude,  we  may  ask,  are  we  to  ascribe  to 
this  interpretation  of  the  world?  It  is  here,  of  course, 
that  we  come  upon  what  is  most  characteristic  of  meta- 
physics, its  reduction  of  the  world  to  terms  of  conscious 
agency.  What  species  of  certitude  attaches  to  such  inter- 
pretation, and  if  it  be  genuine  why  is  it  not  universally 
recognized?  In  regard  to  the  latter  part  of  this  question 
it  is  clear  that  the  value  one  attaches  to  the  metaphysical 
interpretation  will  depend  directly  on  the  value  he  already 
ascribes  to  mental  existences.  If  these  are  not  regarded  as 
real  but  only  phenomenal  or  epi-phenomenal,  it  will  follow 
logically  that  they  cannot  be  taken  as  models  for  the  inter- 
pretation of  reality.  In  case  they  are  valued  as  real 
existences,  then  it  is  logical  that  they  should  be  taken  as 
models  for  the  final  interpretation  of  the  real.  The  only 
other  alternative  here  would  be  materialism,  and  the  meta- 
physical ground  for  rejecting  materialism  and  taking  con- 
sciousness as  the  type  of  ultimate  reality  is  found  in  the 
fact  that  a  material  agent  cannot  give  final  meaning  to  its 
world,  whereas  a  conscious  agent  exercises  that  prerogative 
by  connecting  the  world  activities  not  simply  with  efficiency 
but  also  with  ideal  foresight  and  purpose.  It  is  because 
some  final  meaning  of  things  is  rationally  required  while 
no  other  kind  of  an  agency  than  a  mental  or  conscious  one 
can  satisfy  this  demand,  that  certitude  attaches  to  the 
metaphysical  interpretation.  The  certitude  here  is  not 
intuitive,  of  course,  nor  is  it  of  that  species  of  rational 


132  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

necessity  which  rests  on  natural  causation.  It  is,  neverthe- 
less, a  form  of  rational  necessity;  one  that  rests  directly 
on  the  principle  of  teleological  or  final  causation.  It  may 
be  said,  then,  that  the  certitudes  of  metaphysics  are  of  two 
species,  (1)  that  by  which  it  holds  to  the  reality  of  mental 
existences,  and  (2)  that  which  attaches  to  its  interpretation 
of  the  world  in  terms  of  mind. 

In  the  first  paragraph  of  this  chapter  we  distinguished 
between  the  certitude  of  knowledge  and  that  of  belief. 
Up  to  this  point  we  have  been  exclusively  engaged  with  the 
species  of  certitude  which  fall  under  knowledge.  Belief 
differs  from  knowledge,  as  we  saw,  in  that  its  deciding  con- 
sideration is  a  practical  rather  than  a  theoretic  datum. 
Now  there  are  three  questions  regarding  belief  which  we 
wish  to  consider  briefly  in  closing  this  chapter:  (1)  what  is 
the  real  difference  between  a  practical  and  a  theoretic 
datum,  (2)  what  certitude  attaches  to  the  belief -judgment, 
and  (3)  what  is  the  place  of  the  belief -judgment  in  a  meta- 
physical scheme?  In  order  to  determine  the  difference 
between  a  practical  and  a  theoretic  datum  it  will  be  neces- 
sary to  distinguish  between  a  practical  and  a  theoretic  end. 
The  aim  of  the  theoretic  activity  is  to  interpret  and  under- 
stand the  world:  in  short,  to  translate  it  into  terms  of 
meaning;  that  of  a  practical  activity  is  use,  appropriation, 
enjoyment :  in  short,  the  translation  of  the  world  into  terms 
of  good.  We  do  not  ordinarily  use  the  term  value  in  con- 
nection with  meaning,  but  rather  in  connection  with  good. 
Things  have  value  in  proportion  to  their  efficacy  in  con- 
tributing to  the  good.  Now  the  good  may  be  expressed  in 
ultimate  terms  of  satisfaction.  A  datum  which  makes 
directly  for  satisfaction  will  be  practical  rather  than 
theoretic,  while  a  datum  which  makes  directly  for  meaning 
will  be  theoretic  rather  than  practical.  It  is  true  also  that 
the  practical  datum  may  have  an  indirect  reference  to 
meaning,  while  a  theoretic  datum  may  make  indirectly  for 
good.     But  it  is  only  the  direct  reference  that  counts  in 


chap.v.  PEIMAKY  CERTITUDE.  133 

determining:  whether  the  datum  in  question  shall  be  classed 
as  practical  or  theoretic. 

What  certitude  attaches,  then,  to  the  belief -judgment? 
In  the  first  place,  we  wish  to  make  clear  that  we  do  not 
mean  practical  certitude— the  certainty  that  it  is  a  valid 
condition  of  the  good,  but  rather  theoretic  certitude— the 
certainty  that  it  also  expresses  part  of  the  reality  of 
the  world.  It  is  clear  that  the  practical  judgment  may 
have  different  grades  of  theoretic  value.  We  narrow  our 
inquiry  here  down  to  the  question,  What  is  the  highesl 
theoretic  value  a  belief-judgment  can  have?  and  we  would 
answer  that  it  attains  its  highest  value  when  it  stands  as 
a  real  postulate  of  what  Kant  calls  the  practical  reason. 
Let  us  suppose  that  something  is  so  related  to  a  scheme  of 
rational  good  that  its  non-existence  would  destroy  the 
rationality  of  the  scheme.  There  would  be  a  ground  of 
rational  necessity  arising  out  of  the  relation  of  the  datum 
to  the  system  of  good,  for  asserting  it,  and  it  would  be 
affirmed  with  a  strong  degree  of  certitude.  The  nerve  of 
the  necessity  would  be  found  in  the  insight  that  its  denial 
could  not  de-rationalize  the  system  practically,  without 
making  a  breach  also  in  its  theoretic  meaning.  On  this 
ground  its  truth  would  be  asserted  on  the  basis  of  practical 
necessity. 

The  following  considerations  bear  on  the  question  of  the 
metaphysical  value  of  the  belief -judgment.  Science  re- 
jects the  belief -judgment  because  it  is  teleological  in  its 
form  rather  than  mechanical.  This,  however,  cannot  be  a 
ground  of  objection  to  its  metaphysical  use  since  meta- 
physics is  teleological.  The  only  question  here  is  whether 
belief  presents  a  form  of  certitude  which  entitles  it  to  meta- 
physical credence.  Whatever  the  truth  may  be  regarding 
lower  forms  of  belief,  it  cannot  be  doubted  that  the  belief - 
judgment  which  rests  on  practical  necessity  possesses  a  certi- 
tude which  entitles  it  to  rank  alongside  of  other  metaphysical 
forms.     Some,  if  not  all,  of  the  judgments  of  metaphysics 


134  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

may  legitimately  take  the  form  of  postulates  of  practical 
reason. 

The  truth  is,  there  are  strong  reasons  for  regarding  the 
metaphysical  judgments  as  in  general  forms  of  the  judg- 
ment of  belief.  But  they  are  belief -judgments  of  a  special 
type  and  find  their  analogues  in  the  Kantian  postulates  of 
practical  reason. 

In  fact,  if  Kant's  insight  had  been  surer  at  this  vital 
point  in  his  system  he  might  have  made  out  a  stronger 
case  for  his  postulates  than  he  was  in  fact  able  to  do.  At 
the  same  time  he  might  have  indefinitely  strengthened  the 
foundations  of  his  metaphysics.  Let  us  consider  the  type 
of  problem  with  which  he  was  dealing  in  the  metaphysical 
section  of  his  critique.  It  was  precisely  the  question 
whether  or  not  the  judgments  in  which  we  affirm  freedom, 
immortality  and  God,  are  theoretically  certain  and,  there- 
fore, demonstrable,  as  rationalism  had  assumed.  And 
Kant's  conclusion,  from  which  we  do  not  here  demur,  was 
that  the  theoretic  data  are  not  sufficient  in  themselves  to 
ground  an  assured  judgment.  From  the  standpoint  of 
pure  theoretic  knowledge,  then,  these  issues  remain  prob- 
lems which  reason  can  state  but  cannot  solve.  The  reason 
was  that  no  "holding  turn"  could  be  found  in  experi- 
ence for  translating  them  into  real  judgments  of  exist- 
ence. Kant  therefore  gave  up  the  theoretic  case  as 
hopeless.  From  the  standpoint  of  practical  reason,  how- 
ever, he  came  upon  these  same  issues,  and  here  by  means 
of  their  moral  value  they  were  able  to  take  a  vital  hold  upon 
experience.  As  a  moral  subject  man  is  more  than  a  crea- 
ture of  sensibility.  He  is  real  up  to  the  measure  of  his 
duty,  and  this  measure  includes  freedom,  immortality,  and 
relationship  to  God.  In  other  words,  as  a  bearer  of  moral 
demands  man  becomes  a  real  spiritual  agent,  and  his  judg- 
ments as  organs  of  spiritual  values  become  authoritative 
and  supply  solutions  to  the  theoretic  problems.  Now 
Kant's  work  here  would  have  been  in  a  great  measure 
satisfactory   had   he   reconsidered   the   whole    question   of 


chap.v.  PRIMARY  CERTITUDE.  135 

metaphysics  at  this  point  in  the  light  of  the  combined 
theoretic  and  practical  data.  No  doubt,  had  he  done  so,  he 
would  have  seen  that  it  was  not  necessary  to  leave  his  judg- 
ments standing  as  pure  postulates  of  the  practical  reason, 
but  that  they  have  also  strong  theoretic  support.  This 
theoretic  ground  can  perhaps  be  indicated  most  clearly 
as  follows.  Kant's  method  of  deducing  the  ideas  of  meta- 
physics from  the  forms  of  the  syllogism,  to  a  great  extent 
blinded  him  to  the  fact  that  underlying  this  whole  use  of 
reason  are  the  analogies  of  selfhood,  and  that  it  is  only  by 
using  the  type  of  reality  supplied  by  self-experience,  that 
reason  is  able  to  find  the  principle  for  the  ultimate  unifica- 
tion of  the  world.  In  spite  of  this,  however,  he  recognizes 
that  in  these  ideas  of  reason  we  have  the  ideals  which 
reason  holds  before  the  mind  as  models  of  perfection.  It 
is  with  Kant  as  though  reason  should  say,  "these  ideas 
represent  what  being  would  be  if  the  best  became  real." 
Now,  of  course,  the  best  is  the  most  rational,  and  this  Kant 
recognizes  in  his  contention  that  it  is  rationally  necessary 
for  the  mind  to  conceive  the  system  of  things  as  completing 
itself  under  these  categories;  only,  he  is  not  ready  to 
adopt  the  principle  that  the  rationally  best  is  real.  Nor 
are  we  ready  for  that.  But  Kant  has  reached  his  con- 
clusion on  the  basis  of  general  theoretic  considerations. 
These  represent  the  rationally  best  and  most  perfect  world. 
Let  us  take  this  result,  then,  which  reason  affirms  on  the 
principle  of  self-analogy,  and  we  shall  find  that  it  justifies 
us  in  saying  that  the  metaphysical  judgments  are  in  the 
highest  degree  rational.  Let  us,  then,  with  Kant,  investi- 
gate, not  simply  the  ethical  consciousness,  but  the  whole 
practical  side  including  the  aesthetic  and  religious  inter- 
ests; in  fact,  the  whole  field  and  scope  of  values,  in  order 
to  find,  as  he  finds,  a  principle  which  will  assert  the  full 
measure  of  these  practical  values  as  a  whole,  and  not 
simply  the  value  of  the  moral.  When  we  have  achieved 
this,  what  will  be  the  nature  of  our  results  and  how,  if  at 
all,   shall   it   be   permitted   to   modify   our   theoretic   con- 


136  ANALYSIS.  part  i. 

elusion?  The  answer  with  which  we  close  here  will  be  in 
two  parts.  In  the  first  place,  just  as  Kant  brought  to  the 
support  of  his  postulates  the  full  force  of  moral  necessity, 
so  we  may  bring  to  the  support  of  the  metaphysical  judg- 
ments the  full  force  of  practical  necessity  in  its  broadest 
and  richest  sense.  In  short,  we  may  formulate  our  prin- 
ciple as  that  of  ideal  good,  and  just  as  to  the  Kantian  the 
denial  of  his  postulate  means  the  death  of  moral  good, 
so  to  us  the  denial  of  the  metaphysical  judgments  means 
the  death  of  ideal  good,  and  consequently  the  fall  of 
the  whole  world  of  good  into  the  perdition  of  irrationality. 
If  the  denial  of  the  metaphysical  judgment  means  the  per- 
dition of  man's  ideal  interests  and  good,  there  is  the  very 
highest  motive  supplied  for  the  will  to  believe.  On  the 
final  question,  then,  as  to  how,  if  at  all,  this  result  is  to  be 
permitted  to  influence  our  theoretic  conclusions,  a  very 
brief  statement  will  suffice.  If  the  rationally  best  is  also 
the  best  practically,  it  would  seem  that  we  are  not  left 
wholly  to  the  tender  mercies  of  either  the  rationalist  or  the 
pragmatist.  The  practical  consideration  of  value  supplies 
the  strongest  kind  of  a  motive  to  conviction ;  but  on  the 
other  hand  the  judgments  are  theoretically  reasonable  in 
the  highest  degree.  Are  we  not  in  possession  of  two  strings 
to  our  bow  instead  of  one,  and  if  our  judgments  be  theoret- 
ically  reasonable  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other  hand, 
practically  necessary,  may  we  not  weave  the  two  strands 
together  and  find  a  support  for  our  conviction  that  shall  be 
adequate  ? 

If  we  call  this  completed  conviction  rational  belief  and 
claim  it  as  the  distinctive  feature  of  the  higher  judgments 
of  metaphysics,  the  species  and  grounds  of  metaphysical 
certitude  will  have  been  made  clear  and  also  the  true  basis 
of  a  rational  synthesis  of  metaphysics  and  natural 
science. 


PART  II 

SYNTHESIS 


DIVISION  A 

FROM  PHYSICS  TO  SOCIALITY 


CHAPTER  I. 


THE  DIALECTIC. 


We  are  now  confirmed  in  the  belief  that  in  dealing  with  the 
same  world  of  experience  a  real  distinction  arises  between 
the  procedures  of  natural  science  and  metaphysics.  We 
are  also  convinced  that  a  notion  of  metaphysics  which 
would  represent  its  method  as  simply  an  extension  of  the 
concepts  of  science  beyond  their  ordinary  limits  would 
leave  out  its  most  characteristic  features.  There  are  two 
real  and  distinct  standpoints  in  experience  from  which 
consciousness  goes  out  in  its  effort  to  realize  the  world, 
(1)  the  inner  and  more  essential  standpoint  of  intelligent 
agency,  and  (2)  the  more  external  standpoint  of  ordinary 
observation.  The  first  of  these  is  that  of  metaphysics,  the 
second  that  of  natural  science.  Correlated  with  these  dif- 
ferent standpoints  are  two  opposite  presuppositions  about 
the  objects  of  investigation.  Metaphysics,  which  identifies 
itself  with  the  consciousness  of  inner  agency,  sets  out  with 
the  presumption  of  a  community  of  nature  between  subject 
and  object,  or  between  consciousness  and  the  world;  while 
natural  science,  identifying  itself  with  the  outer  observing 
consciousness,  just  as  naturally  sets  out  with  the  presump- 
tion of  indifference  of  nature  between  the  investigator  and 
the  world.  Again,  it  has  been  found  that  the  central  prin- 
ciple of  natural  science,  that  which  determines  the  dynamic 
relations  of  the  parts  of  the  world,  is  natural  causation,  a 
principle   of   non-previsive   agency   whose   effects    are   re- 

139 


140  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

garded  as  the  phenomena  of  efficient  forces  which  act  without 
mental  foresight.  The  corresponding  principle  that  stands 
central  in  metaphysics  and  defines  the  mode  of  its  agency 
is  that  of  idea-purpose,  a  principle  whose  results  are  to  be 
regarded  as  the  fulfillment  of  previsional  intention.  We 
call  any  method  or  procedure  mechanical  in  which  natural 
causation  is  the  central  determining  principle,  while  to  a 
method  in  which  the  principle  of  ideal  prevision  or  finality 
is  central  we  apply  the  distinguishing  designation  teleolog- 
ical,  and  throughout  the  discussion  these  terms  will  be 
used  in  the  sense  here  indicated. 

Let  us  then  attempt  to  state  the  two  methods  of  natural 
science  and  metaphysics  in  such  a  way  as  to  bring  out  their 
real  connection.  In  the  first  place,  the  fact  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  the  two  methods  though  clearly  distinguishable 
are  not  absolutely  separable.  It  will  be  found  that  natural 
science  in  all  its  proceedings  clings  to  a  latent  recognition 
of  an  inner  nature  of  things  which  it  regards  as  unknow- 
able, but  at  the  same  time  essential  to  reality.  Natural 
science  is  not  founded  on  a  denial  of  the  inner  nature  of 
things,  but  simply  claims  the  right  to  neglect  this  nature 
in  the  attainment  of  its  own  results.  And  the  truth  is  that 
this  neglect  is  only  relative.  There  is  an  important  sense 
in  which  it  becomes  necessary  for  natural  science  at  a  cer- 
tain stage  of  its  development  to  recall  for  revision  its 
presumption  of  the  unknowability  of  the  deeper  nature  of 
things.  And  the  point  where  this  revision  becomes  neces- 
sary arises  in  connection  with  that  period  in  the  growth  of 
natural  science  at  which  it  begins  to  respond  to  the  demand 
that  its  empirical  results  shall  be  rationally  grounded. 
The  scientific  impulse,  if  it  be  genuine,  will  not  rest  content 
with  the  simple  spelling  out  of  the  uniformities  of  things, 
but  is  foredoomed  to  ask  the  question  as  to  the  ground- 
ing of  the  phenomenal  in  a  deeper  system  of  realities.  We 
have  seen  how  this  question  leads  natural  science  to  the 
real  ground-category  of  its  world ;  the  notion  which  connects 
the  observable  movements  of  things  with  deeper  and  more 


chap.  I.  THE  DIALECTIC.  141 

abiding  substances  or  forces  to  which  they  are  related  as 
phenomenal  effects.  Now  it  is  in  the  development  of  this 
notion,  which  is  very  clearly  necessary,  that  the  revision 
we  have  alluded  to  takes  place.  We  shall  ask  and  try  to 
answer  two  questions  here,  (1)  What  is  the  nature  of  this 
revision,  and  (2)  To  what  extent  does  it  make  the  founda- 
tions of  natural  science  metaphysical?  The  answer  to  the 
first  question  is  found  in  the  doctrine  of  underlying  sub- 
stances to  which  natural  science  commits  itself  in  its 
theories  of  matter,  force,  ether  or  even  of  something  more 
refined  still,  if  that  be  possible.  The  need  of  under- 
lying substances  arose  as  we  saw  from  the  requirement  that 
the  movements  of  the  phenomenal  should  be  more  stably 
grounded,  and  the  fulfillment  of  this  requirement  in  the 
doctrine  of  underlying  substances  led  to  a  transformation 
of  the  foundations  of  science.  Phenomena  could  no  longer 
be  regarded  as  themselves  full-fledged  reals,  but  became 
symbols  of  deeper  realities.  These  were  the  substances 
which  science  construed  in  its  theories  of  matter,  force, 
ether,  etc.  Let  us  apply  the  one  term  materiality  to  these 
substances  and  let  us  understand  by  materiality  a  term  of 
characterization  which  directly  qualifies  the  deeper  nature 
of  things  in  such  a  way  that  negatively  it  excludes  the 
characteristics  of  mental  agency,  while  positively  it  in- 
cludes only  the  ascription  of  such  qualities  to  this  nature 
as  are  essential  to  the  production  of  effects  in  the  phe- 
nomenal world  in  accordance  with  the  form  of  agency 
embodied  in  the  principle  of  natural  causation.  A  history 
of  the  progressive  revisions  to  which  science  has  submitted 
its  doctrine  of  materiality  would  bear  out  the  truth  of  this 
statement.  We  answer  the  first  question,  then,  by  saying 
that  natural  science  recognizes  the  deeper  nature  of  things 
just  so  far  (and  no  farther)  as  it  is  forced  to  do  so  in  order 
to  ground  its  principle  of  natural  causation  and  that  the 
limit  to  which  it  may  go  in  positively  qualifying  that  nature 
is  determined  by  the  same  consideration.  This  conclusion 
will  take  away  some   of  the  difficulties   from  the  second 


142  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

question,— to  what  extent  the  doctrine  of  materiality  makes 
natural  science  metaphysical  in  its  foundations.  Strictly 
speaking  we  should  have  to  say  that  the  revision  is  not  at 
all  metaphysical,  inasmuch  as  it  excludes  from  its  founda- 
tions the  kind  of  agency  that  is  distinctly  metaphysical; 
and  this  answer  will  have  to  stand  at  its  face  value.  The 
physicist's  doctrine  of  materiality  does  not  transform  him 
into  a  metaphysician  and  he  may  take  courage  and  go 
forward.  But  it  does  bring  his  whole  point  of  view  into 
more  friendly  relations  with  metaphysics.  Metaphysics 
rests  on  two  fundamental  judgments,  (1)  that  things  have 
a  deeper,  hidden  nature,  and  (2)  that  this  nature  is  essen- 
tially mental  and  previsional.  The  revision  of  natural 
science  leads  it  to  assent  to  the  first  judgment.  This  estab- 
lishes a  point  of  community,  the  assertion  of  a  deeper  world- 
nature  which  each  treats  in  its  own  characteristic  way. 
We  should  answer  the  second  question,  then,  by  saying  that 
while  the  revision  establishes  common  ground  between 
natural  science  and  metaphysics,  it  leaves  the  field  of  real 
vital  distinction  untouched.  The  whole  method  of  natural 
science  is  determined  by  its  principle  of  natural  causation 
in  which  is  defined  the  kind  of  agency  it  will  admit  into  its 
world.  On  the  other  hand  the  type  of  metaphysical  agency 
we  have  determined  as  that  of  finality. 

The  problem  here  will  be  that  of  restating  the  two 
methods  of  natural  science  and  metaphysics  in  the  light 
of  these  later  conclusions.  Natural  science  having  arrived 
at  the  point  where  it  no  longer  regards  the  phenomena  with 
which  it  deals  as  separate  existences,  but  instead,  as  sym- 
bols of  a  hidden  and  more  real  nature  which  they  do  not 
reveal,  nevertheless  asserts  this  hidden  nature  as  the  neces- 
sary grounding  of  the  phenomenal  and  connects  it  with  the 
phenomenal  by  means  of  the  principle  of  natural  causation. 
This  principle  of  natural  causation  embodies  the  type  of 
agency  which  excludes  mental  characteristics  and  gets  its 
results  by  means  of  efficiency  without  mental  guidance  or 
idea.     As  thus  defined  the  method  of  natural  science  is 


chap.  i.  THE  DIALECTIC.  143 

plainly  mechanical.  Metaphysics,  on  the  other  hand,  set- 
ting out  from  this  common  ground,  the  postulate  of  a  deeper 
nature  of  things  of  which  the  world  of  perception  and 
observation  supplies  symbols,  asserts  the  identity  of  this 
inner  nature  with  the  inner  nature  of  consciousness,  that 
nature  which  is  revealed  in  the  central  effort  of  conscious- 
ness to  overcome  and  realize  the  world.  Having  asserted 
this  identity  of  nature,  metaphysics  translates  the  agency  of 
this  inner  nature  into  terms  of  that  deeper  agency  which 
operates  centrally  in  consciousness,  and  this  supplies  the 
norm  from  which  it  develops  its  central  principle,  that  of 
finality  or  previsional  and  purposive  causation.  So  de- 
fined the  method  of  metaphysics  is  clearly  teleological,  and 
in  this  discussion  the  terms  mechanical  and  teleological  will 
be  used  as  designations  of  the  contrasted  methods  of  natural 
science  and  metaphysics. 

In  addition  to  the  distinction  between  the  two  reflective 
standpoints  in  consciousness,  there  is  another  equally  funda- 
mental distinction  to  be  noted,  that  between  the  spontaneous 
and  reflective  consciousness.  We  have  already  become 
familiar  with  this  distinction  and  recall  it  here  on  account 
of  its  bearings  on  the  discussions  on  which  we  are  about  to 
enter.  It  may  be  asked  here,  why  introduce  the  sponta- 
neous consciousness  into  a  discussion  that  is  scientific  and 
metaphysical?  Does  not  science  begin  by  turning  its  back 
on  spontaneity  and  reconsidering  all  its  conclusions  from 
the  outset  ?  We  answer  that  what  science  rejects  primarily 
is  the  method  of  spontaneity.  This  leads,  of  course,  to 
scepticism  as  to  its  results  and  the  demand  that  nothing 
shall  be  admitted  as  true  that  has  not  first  submitted  to  the 
stricter  ordeal  of  scientific  method.  Recognizing  this,  there 
is  yet  an  important  sense  in  which  the  value  of  spontaneity 
survives  the  rejection  of  its  method.  It  supplies  a  concrete 
world-view  which  persists  and  provides  an  important 
datum  for  both  the  scientist  and  the  metaphysician.  This 
concrete  world-view  is  that  of  the  plain  man  who  has  not 
been   disturbed  by  science   or  metaphysics  and  who  still 


144  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

continues  to  take  the  things  of  sense  as  solid  realities  rather 
than  as  symbols  of  some  deeper  reality.  We  may  call  this 
the  view  of  common  sense,  the  common  doctrine  of  the 
world,  or  the  view  of  the  spontaneous  consciousness.  No 
matter  how  we  characterize  it,  it  holds  its  place  in  con- 
sciousness as  a  persistent  view-point  and  one  that  stands  as 
a  rival  candidate  for  our  belief,  alongside  of  the  concepts 
of  natural  science  and  metaphysics.  Let  us  bear  in  mind, 
now,  that  it  is  only  the  method  of  the  spontaneous  con- 
sciousness which  science  and  metaphysics  reject  primarily, 
and  that  their  rejection  springs  directly  from  the  fact  that 
the  spontaneous  method  is  uncritical,  that  it  has  no  clear 
consciousness  of  the  presuppositions  on  which  it  rests  and 
that  it  is  too  hasty  in  reaching  conclusions.  Admitting  all 
this,  it  does  not  invalidate  the  whole  view  of  the  spon- 
taneous consciousness.  The  plain  man's  view  of  the  world 
may  yet  have  something  of  value  for  us,  and  that  is  just  the 
point  we  are  about  to  raise  here. 

We  shall  ask,  then,  What  value  has  the  knowledge  of  the 
plain  man  for  science  and  metaphysics  ?  We  know  that  the 
plain  man  takes  his  perceptions  for  realities  and  that  his 
mistake,  as  we  think  it  to  be,  has  no  disastrous  practical 
consequences,  since  his  world  behaves  itself  in  a  way  that  is 
perfectly  consistent  with  his  assumption.  Why  do  we  say, 
then,  that  he  is  mistaken?  Simply  because  he  has  over- 
looked a  distinction  that  would  completely  transform  the 
meaning  of  his  world.  A  recognition  of  this  distinction 
would  lead  him  to  regard  his  perceptions  as  symbols  of 
deeper  realities  to  which  they  stand  related  as  effects.  A 
very  grave  theoretic  mistake  we  say,  but  one  that  scarcely 
touches  the  practical  life  inasmuch  as  the  deeper  causal 
reactions  will  be  the  same  whether  we  regard  our  percep- 
tions as  things  or  as  symbols  of  things.  What  survives 
as  true  and  valid  in  the  world- view  of  the  plain  man  is  its 
practical  side.  He  supplies  us  with  an  example  of  a  prac- 
tical truth  with  which  any  theoretic  doctrine  we  may  reach 
as  to  the  nature  of  things  must  not  be  incompatible.     We 


chap.  I.  THE  DIALECTIC.  145 

thus  reach  a  criterion  that  when  generalized  becomes  an 
important  principle  of  negative  guidance.  It  is  open,  we 
admit,  to  the  theorist  to  disclaim  all  responsibility  for  the 
plain  man  and  to  develop  his  doctrines  regardless  of  the 
plain  man's  interest.  But  this  is  a  high-handed  procedure 
inasmuch  as  the  plain  man's  life-experience  is  a  real  fea- 
ture of  the  world  which  cannot  be  eliminated.  Besides, 
the  difference  between  the  plain  man  and  the  man  who  has 
been  enlightened  by  natural  science  and  metaphysics  will 
be  found  to  be  mainly  theoretical.  The  plain  man  and  the 
philosopher  differ  in  their  interpretations  of  the  world, 
whereas  on  the  practical  side  there  is  a  large  segment  which 
is  common,  and  in  this  lies  substantially  the  whole  of  the 
plain  man's  practical  interest.  This  community  of  practi- 
cal interest  in  the  midst  of  theoretic  difference  would  itself 
supply  an  important  theme  for  further  investigation,  but 
we  shall  content  ourselves  here  with  the  reference  to  the  fact 
already  brought  to  light  in  a  former  discussion,  namely, 
that  the  practical  interest  arises  directly  out  of  the  deeper 
experience  of  agency  and,  therefore,  antedates  the  whole 
theoretic  activity.  We  have  seen  how  this  deeper  experi- 
ence of  agency  in  consciousness  leads  not  only  to  the 
apprehension  of  deeper  objective  realities,  but  also  to  the 
development  of  symbols  of  these  in  bunches  of  perceptions. 
And  the  practical  interest,  not  simply  of  the  plain  man 
but  of  the  conscious  agent  as  such,  is  so  involved  in  the 
maintenance  of  the  reality  of  the  situation  out  of  which  the 
deeper  experience  develops,  that  any  conception  of  the 
nature  of  things  which  proved  itself  finally  incompatible 
with  its  reality  would  be  incurring  a  responsibility  such 
as  the  toughest  theoretic  constitution  would  be  unable  to 
bear.  A  theory  of  the  world  cannot  afford  to  scorn  the 
rock  out  of  which  it  has  been  hewn,  or  to  regard  the  funda- 
mental situation  which  called  it  forth  as  anything  else  than 
real. 

The  criterion  which  the  consciousness  of  the  plain  man 
supplies  is  thus  a  species  of  postulate  of  practical  reason 
10 


146  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

and  has  the  force  which  Kant  ascribed  to  his  practical 
postulates.  We  saw  in  treating  the  practical  postulate  as 
a  form  of  certitude  that  its  value  for  theory  arises  out  of 
the  fact  that  its  denial  would  strike  at  the  rationality  of  the 
world  and  consequently  at  the  foundations  of  theoretic 
truth.  Here  we  have  developed  from  the  practical  inter- 
est of  the  plain  man's  consciousness  a  criterion  which  stands 
in  this  same  fundamental  relation  to  the  theoretic  inter- 
pretation of  the  world.  For  while  it  lays  no  claim  to  direct 
theoretic  value  and  cannot  be  used  directly  or  constitu- 
tively  (to  employ  a  Kantian  term)  in  determining  theoretic 
conclusions,  yet  it  does  possess  value  as  a  negative,  restrain- 
ing principle  and,  like  a  court  of  appeal,  exercises  the 
function  of  enjoining  any  theoretic  construction  incom- 
patible with  its  own  validity. 

The  dialectical  situation  in  consciousness  will  then  be 
represented  by  the  two  distinct  but  not  fundamentally  in- 
compatible methods  of  natural  science  and  metaphysics, 
which  we  have  designated  the  mechanical  and  the  teleolog- 
ical,  together  with  the  caveat  of  the  plain  man's  conscious- 
ness restraining  any  doctrine  that  would  involve  the 
unreality  of  his  practical  experience.  The  process  we  are 
endeavoring  to  sketch  in  this  chapter,  and  which  we  hope 
to  fill  out  in  greater  detail  in  following  chapters,  is  the 
whole  movement  of  the  reflective  consciousness  in  its  effort 
to  put  a  theoretic  construction  on  the  world,  and  our  aim 
is  to  show  how  reflection  satisfies  itself  in  the  progressive 
stages  of  its  movement  and  also  how  the  resources  of  both 
the  methods  which  it  has  at  its  service  are  exhausted  in  this 
effort,  so  that  neither  natural  science  nor  metaphysics  alone 
would  be  able  to  meet  the  demand.  Moreover,  the  outlook 
of  both  natural  science  and  metaphysics  is  objective.  Al- 
lowing for  all  differences,  the  world  that  presents  itself  to 
the  reflection  of  both  natural  science  and  metaphysics  is 
the  world  of  things  on  which  the  common  consciousness 
puts  its  construction.  "What  is  the  nature  of  this  world  of 
things?     Answering  this  question,  natural  science  trans- 


chap.  I.  THE  DIALECTIC.  147 

laics  the  world  of  things  into  terms  of  the  material,  while 
metaphysics  translates  it  into  terms  of  the  mental.  And 
reflection  finds  that  it  has  need  of  both  interpretations  in 
order  to  fill  ont  the  measure  of  theoretic  truth. 

From  the  standpoint  of  this  objective  outlook,  however, 
the  two  ways  of  construing  things  do  not  rest  on  exactly 
the  same  plane.  In  its  objective  experience  consciousness 
finds  the  world  first  symbolized  in  perception,  and  its  first 
point  of  departure  in  its  purely  theoretic  enterprise  will  be 
from  the  standpoint  of  perception.  This  commits  it  to  the 
method  of  natural  science  and  the  world  of  materiality. 
The  motive  of  the  metaphysical  interpretation  lies  deeper 
and  is,  at  first,  latent.  It  arises  in  connection  with  the 
activity  of  natural  science ;  at  first,  to  modify  its  world  and, 
finally,  to  transform  it.  It  is  thus  the  same  world  of  things 
about  which  natural  science  and  metaphysics  busy  them- 
selves, but  in  the  order  of  procedure  the  material  construc- 
tion of  natural  science  stands  in  the  foreground,  while  the 
mental  construction  of  metaphysics  occupies  the  back- 
ground. Moreover,  it  has  already  been  shown  that  the 
construction  of  natural  science  is  one  of  natural  causation 
while  that  of  metaphysics  takes  on  the  form  of  finality. 

Reflection  starts  with  the  things  of  perception  which  the 
common  consciousness  takes  for  realities,  but  which  re- 
flection soon  discovers  to  be  symbols  of  reals  which  do  not 
reveal  their  inner  nature.  It  is  not  to  be  denied  that  the 
discovery  that  perceptions  are  symbols  rather  than  things 
marks  an  epoch  in  the  intellectual  life  and  is  often  the 
cause  of  an  eclipse  of  faith,  but  it  must  be  gone  through 
with  in  order  that  science  may  get  on,  and  the  eclipse  of 
faith  is  likely  to  prove  but  temporary.  The  progress  of 
knowledge  is  ordinarily  accompanied  by  what  may  be 
called  a  transition  from  naive  to  rational  faith.  But 
disregarding  the  faith  issue  our  principal  concern  here 
is  with  the  progress  of  knowledge  in  the  world  of  re- 
flection. The  first  epoch-making  step  is  the  resolution 
of  the  things  of  the  plain  man  into  phenomenal  symbols 


148  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

connected  with  hidden  realities.  This  resolution  of  things 
supplies  the  plain  man  with  no  valid  grounds  for  com- 
plaint provided  it  does  not  carry  with  it  the  unreality  of 
his  own  practical  experience.  Now,  reflection  may  at  this 
point  disrupt  the  connection  of  the  symbol  with  the  under- 
lying real  and  may  regard  the  former  as  the  only  real. 
It  thus  becomes  purely  phenomenalistic.  Or  it  may  deny 
the  value  of  the  phenomenal,  reducing  it  to  mere  appear- 
ance, while  on  metaphysical  grounds  asserting  a  deeper 
reality,  analogous  to  the  Eleatic  being.  In  this  case  it 
becomes  purely  transcendental.  If,  however,  we  take 
natural  science  as  a  reliable  guide  to  the  course  reflection 
actually  follows,  it  will  be  evident  that  both  these  extremes 
are  avoidable  and  that  the  second  epochal  step  will  be  the 
grounding  of  the  phenomenal  world  in  a  deeper  system  of 
substances  which  are  construed  under  the  notion  of  material- 
ity. Science  first  relates  its  phenomena  to  hidden  reals. 
It  then  constructs  a  character  for  these  reals  under  the 
notion  of  materiality.  They  are  substances  which  persist 
and  maintain  themselves  quantitatively  undiminished 
through  all  changes  and  transformations  and  thus  supply 
a  stable  ground- work  to  the  world.  The  notion  of  material 
substances,  which  may  be  construed  as  atoms,  forces,  or 
ether-waves,  and  which  ground  the  phenomenal  without  re- 
vealing their  real  nature  in  its  symbols,  marks  the  second 
revolutionary  step  of  reflection.  In  the  third  place,  the  plain 
man  ascribes  a  direct  causality  to  the  things  of  his  world. 
When  it  grows  suddenly  cold  and  water  turns  into  ice  he 
does  not  hesitate  to  ascribe  direct  causal  agency  to  the  low 
temperature,  and  he  is  just  as  sure  that  when  he  wills  to 
move  his  arm  and  it  moves,  his  conscious  volition  is  the 
direct  agent  in  producing  the  effect.  But  the  first  step  of 
science  resulted  in  the  breaking  up  of  this  simple  world, 
and  the  separation  of  the  plain  man's  things  into  symbols 
connected  with  underlying  natures.  "When  the  question 
of  causation  arises  the  situation  as  conceived  by  natural 
science  seems  to  supply  a  crux  to  reflection.     The  modern 


chap.  i.  THE  DIALECTIC.  149 

doctrines  of  causation  arc  marked  by  a  common  fault,  they 
are  all  too  certain  that  the  plain  man's  theory  is  wrong. 
I  mean  wrong  fundamentally.  And  as  it  is  fundamentally 
a  theory  of  agency,  they  set  out  by  expelling  the  notion  of 
agency.  If  there  be  any  virtue  in  this  discussion  as  far  as 
it  has  gone,  such  conduct  will  have  to  be  revised  and  we  shall 
have  to  look  elsewhere  than  to  the  expulsion  of  agency  for 
the  revolutionary  work  of  science.  If  we  take  the  case  as  it 
actually  presents  itself  to  natural  science  it  would  appear 
that  a  doctrine  of  causation  might  take  several  different 
forms.  In  the  first  place,  if  we  regard  the  world  of  percep- 
tion as  the  only  real,  then  since  it  would  be  absurd  to  sup- 
pose agency  on  the  part  of  mere  symbols,  we  may  become 
pure  phenomenalists  like  Hume  and  translate  the  notion  of 
cause  into  that  of  mere  sequence  in  time.  Anything  may 
then  be  the  cause  of  anything  provided  it  has  the  fortune  to 
uniformly  precede  it.  ^Rejecting  phenomenalism,  we  may 
become  transcendentalists  and  regard  real  causation  as  a 
function  of  things  in  themselves  and  as  having  no  cor- 
respondent in  the  world  of  perception.  It  would  seem, 
however,  that  the  real  practice  of  natural  science  in  reach- 
ing its  results  might  supply  some  theoretic  guidance  in  this 
vexed  field.  Science  may  treat  its  phenomena  in  two  dif- 
ferent ways,  regarding  them  either  as  pure  symbols,  in 
which  case  they  are  connected  wTith  underlying  realities ;  or 
as  symbolized  realities,  in  which  case  the  real  substance  is 
conceived  to  be  immanent  in  its  manifestation  and  phe- 
nomenon bound  to  phenomenon  by  a  real  connection.  In 
either  case  the  link  is  natural  causation.  In  the  former, 
which  is  perhaps  the  most  characteristic,  the  real  sub- 
stance, ligfrt,  electricity,  stands  as  the  agent  which  produces 
the  symbolizing  phenomenon  as  its  effect.  In  the  latter 
case,  which  perhaps  represents  a  more  metaphysical  view, 
the  agent  is  conceived  as  maintaining  itself  in  existence 
through  changes  of  phenomena,  so  that  a  becomes  the 
cause  of  b  only  through  the  unchanged  nature  x  that  is 
immanent  in  both.     In  such  an  instance  the  link  is  forged 


150  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

by  the  common  nature,  which  thus  becomes  the  agent  in 
relating  the  two  otherwise  distinct  symbols.  In  either 
case  the  essential  claims  of  agency  are  recognized.  But 
in  the  more  ordinary  view  of  science  in  which  the  symbol 
is  related  to  the  substance  as  its  effect,  it  is  possible  to 
take  the  relation  of  uniform  sequence  among  the  parts  of 
the  phenomena  as  the  symbolic  equivalent  of  the  causal 
agency  that  underlies  it.  The  calculus  of  uniform  se- 
quences thus  becomes  a  reliable  guide  to  the  operation  of 
underlying  causes.  But  in  no  case  would  the  mere  calculus 
of  uniform  sequences  among  phenomena  have  any  signifi- 
cance were  it  not  kept  in  close  relation  to  the  presupposi- 
tion of  real  agency  underlying  it  and  of  which  it  is  a 
symbol. 

We  thus  reach  the  conception  of  the  world  which 
natural  science  substitutes  for  that  of  the  plain  man.  It 
is  the  plain  man's  world  greatly  modified  but  preserved 
in  one  very  essential  feature.  The  plain  man  and  natural 
science  agree  in  regarding  the  world  as  essentially  a 
world  of  agency,  and  it  is  this  common  faith  in  agency  that 
natural  science  embodies  in  its  principle  of  natural  causa- 
tion. If,  now,  Ave  take  natural  causation  as  the  central 
principle  of  that  method  of  the  reflective  consciousness 
which  we  call  natural  science,  it  will  be  possible  to  charac- 
terize the  whole  activity  of  natural  science  as  one  whose 
aim  is  the  investigation  and  interpretation  of  the  whole 
world  of  phenomena  under  the  principle  of  natural  causa- 
tion. The  latter  is  the  principle  of  physical  as  dis- 
tinguished from  mental  agency.  It  is  the  principle  of  the 
mechanical  as  distinguished  from  the  teleological. 

We  have  seen,  moreover,  that  the  method  of  meta- 
physics involves  a  still  further  transformation  of  the  plain 
man's  world.  The  plain  man  regards  his  perceptions  as 
real  things.  Metaphysics  goes  with  natural  science  in 
breaking  up  this  simplicity,  and  it,  too,  looks  at  the  world 
of  perceptions  as  a  symbol  of  deeper  realities.  But  what 
the  perceptual  world  symbolizes  for  metaphysics  is  a  deeper 


chap.  I.  THE  DIALECTIC.  151 

arena  where  the  realizing  of  ideas  and  the  fulfilling  of 
purposes  is  going  forward.  What  does  the  great  pano- 
rama of  perception  symbolize  to  metaphysics  but  the 
operation  of  agencies,  divine  or  otherwise?  And  the  con- 
nection of  these  with  an  ideal  prius  in  which  they  are 
conceived  and  intended,  translates  them  into  processes  of 
reality.  The  symbol  in  metaphysics  stands,  therefore,  for 
the  fuJ fining  of  an  ideally  conceived  purpose  and  its  mean- 
ing ceases  to  be  physical  and  becomes  mental.  And  just 
as  in  natural  science  the  central  principle  is  natural  causa- 
tion, so  here  the  principle  of  metaphysical  construction,  the 
norm  which  determines  the  form  of  its  world-interpretation, 
is  finality,  or,  as  we  might  say,  teleological  causation.  In 
all  this  transformation,  however,  which  has  completely 
broken  up  the  simplicity  of  the  plain  man's  world,  there  is 
one  central  article  of  his  creed  that  has  been  preserved. 
That  is  his  faith  in  agency  as  the  central  fact  of  the  world. 
The  metaphysical  transformation,  like  that  of  natural 
science,  ends  by  confirming  this  central  doctrine.  The 
plain  man's  world  is  a  world  of  agency.  Natural  science 
translates  this  agency  into  terms  of  natural  causation, 
while  metaphysics  construes  it  in  terms  of  prevision  and 
finality. 

The  movement  of  the  reflective  consciousness  we  have 
called  a  dialectic,  but  this  term  requires  some  explanation. 
It  means  the  interplay  of  two  forces  but  not  on  the  same 
plane.  There  is  a  sense,  we  admit,  in  which  the  methods 
of  natural  science  and  metaphysics  might  stand  as  rival 
and  incompatible  modes  of  interpreting  the  same  world. 
But  this  would  not  represent  a  true  dialectic.  It  is  only 
when  the  fulfilling  of  one  method  leads  on  by  way  of  a  kind 
of  reaction  to  the  application  of  the  other,  that  real 
dialectic  arises.  The  dialectical  procedure  rests  on  pro- 
gressive insight  rather  than  accident  or  blind  antagonism. 
The  normal  order  is  first  the  application  of  the  method  of 
natural  science,  which  involvas  the  translation  of  the  whole 
world   into  terms   of  natural   causation.     Let  us   suppose 


152  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

that  the  method  has  completed  itself  and  that  every  phe- 
nomenon has  been  mechanically  connected  with  its  ground. 
Is  there  anything  further  to  be  said?  The  very  nature  of 
the  physical  type  of  agency  to  which  everything  has  been 
reduced  reveals  the  fitness  of  the  world-representation  for 
a  linal  theory  of  the  meaning  of  things.  Phenomena  are 
connected  as  effects  with  underlying  causes.  But  these 
causes,  while  they  supply  efficiency  for  the  production  of 
things,  do  not  provide  the  reasons  for  their  existence. 
Physical  causation  does  not  supply  the  rationale  of  things, 
and,  so  far  as  it  is  concerned,  their  non-existence,  or  the 
existence  of  their  opposites,  could  make  no  difference 
to  the  world.  At  a  critical  point  natural  science  gives  the 
world  over  to  blind  chance  or,  at  least,  to  a  blind  energy 
that  can  only  chance  it  in  the  production  of  results.  Now, 
it  is  at  this  point  where  the  world  is  threatened  with 
irrational  overthrow  that  the  type  of  agency  which  we  call 
mental  begins  to  assert  itself.  Mental  agency  differs  from 
physical,  as  we  have  seen,  in  being  previsive  and  in  trans- 
lating its  causal  term  into  ideally  informed  purpose. 
Thus  arises  the  method  of  metaphysics.  Here  the  dia- 
lectic works  by  means  of  the  insight  that  the  only 
thing  which  can  save  the  world  from  irrational  over- 
throw is  the  introduction  of  prevision  into  the  efficient 
agencies  of  things.  If  mere  blind  will,  or  push,  is  not 
sufficient,  the  qualifying  of  it  with  insight  translates  it 
into  idea  or  relates  it  to  an  idea  in  which  its  efficiency 
becomes  the  fulfillment  of  what  is  prevised  and  intended. 
The  metaphysical  method  is  thus  launched  and  fulfills  its 
mission  in  the  construction  of  the  world  in  terms  of 
rational  meaning,  that  is,  in  terms  of  finality. 

How,  then,  do  we  find  our  way  back  again  to  the  world 
of  natural  science?  This  is  a  pertinent  question  inas- 
much as  it  is  not  given  to  any  one  to  live  in  a  pure  meta- 
physical world.  But  the  answer  is  not  so  far  to  seek.  It 
is  the  plain  man  in  each  of  us  with  his  practical  interests 
that  brings  us  back.     We  have   referred  the  conduct  of 


chap.  I.  THE  DIALECTIC.  153 

things  to  prevision  in  order  to  qualify  them  with  meaning, 
but  we  are  not  long  in  discovering  that  this  prevision  is 
not  our  own  and  that  it  makes  no  direct  revelation  of  its 
intentions  to  us.  For  practical  purposes,  then,  Ave  have  to 
regard  the  intentions  of  the  world  as  hidden,  and  its  move- 
ments as  phenomena  which  have  to  be  translated  into  terms 
of  natural  causation,  that  is,  of  non-previsive  agency. 
This  may  seem  like  a  lame  conclusion,  but  it  is  good  sense 
and  it  fits  into  the  dialectic  by  instituting  another  moment 
of  natural  science  which  in  turn  leads  on  to  the  moment  of 
metaphysical  interpretation.  The  result  of  the  dialectic  is 
a  progressive  application  of  the  method  and  principle  of 
n;it oral  science  to  successive  groups  of  world  phenomena 
giving  rise  to  successive  stages  of  natural  science,  while 
in  connection  with  this  there  develops  a  series  of  meta- 
physical insights  leading  to  a  progressive  metaphysical 
interpretation. 

Let  us  then  attempt  to  outline  briefly  the  stages  of  the 
dialectic  in  its  actual  application  and  in  connection  with 
these  the  points  where  the  most  important  transitions  and 
transformations  arise.  If  we  take  the  world  of  experience 
as  a  whole  it  will  be  obvious  that  the  point  of  major  trans- 
formation, as  we  shall  call  it,  is  the  one  where  conscious- 
ness becomes  overt  as  an  agent  in  giving  rise  to  effects. 
Below  this  point  the  world  will  be  dominantly  or  wholly 
physical  and  the  reign  of  natural  causation  will  be  un- 
broken. The  world  as  qualified  by  consciousness  will  be 
one  in  which  we  shall  have  to  deal  with  a  correlation  of  the 
mental  and  physical  orders  and  in  which  natural  causation, 
though  still  the  supreme  principle  of  science,  will  find  it 
necessary  to  submit  to  many  transformations  in  the  form 
of  its  application.  To  the  world  below  consciousness  as 
well  as  to  the  world  qualified  and  transformed  by  con- 
sciousness, the  dialectical  movement  of  reflection  will  apply, 
(1)  in  the  movement  of  natural  science  in  its  attempl  to 
construe  the  activities  of  things  under  the  principle  of 
natural  causation,  (2)  in  that  of  metaphysics  whose  effort 


154  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

will  be  to  attain  a  rational  interpretation  of  the  inner  and 
(to  science)  hidden  nature  of  things.  The  stages  which  will 
arise  in  the  course  of  this  synthetic  effort  may  be  indicated 
as  follows.  Below  the  point  where  consciousness  becomes 
an  overt  factor  in  the  world,  there  are  at  least  two  grades 
of  phenomena  which  are  distinguished  as  inorganic  and 
organic.  The  inorganic  is  the  sphere  of  the  unqualified 
operation  of  purely  physical  forces  and  agencies.  Here  we 
have  the  reign  of  natural  causation  in  its  utmost  simplicity, 
inasmuch  as  it  has  but  one  order  and  one  type  of  activity 
to  deal  with,  the  type  called  motion  in  space  and  time. 
The  representative  science  here  is  physics,  to  whose  pro- 
cesses mathematics  becomes  instrumental.  At  the  limit 
of  the  field  of  the  inorganic  the  organism  appears  and 
transforms  the  physical  world.  We  are  dealing  here  only 
with  the  organic  below  consciousness,  that  is,  with  life 
before  it  takes  on  the  overt  form  of  conscious  movement. 
The  appearance  of  the  organism,  whatever  be  our  con- 
ception of  the  nature  of  the  life  it  embodies,  introduces 
complexity  into  the  physical  world  where  before  was  rela- 
tive simplicity.  The  organism  arises  in  the  midst  of  the 
more  general  physical  forces  and  presents  for  the  first  time 
the  appearance  of  an  imperium  in  imperio.  There  is,  in 
fact,  a  double  series,  the  outer  physical  and  the  inner, 
constituting  the  life-movement  of  the  organism,  and  the 
problem  of  their  relation  arises  and  requires  settlement 
before  science  can  get  on. 

Below  the  point  of  consciousness,  then,  two  distinguish- 
able forms  of  world-activity  arise,  the  inorganic  whose 
organ  is  physics  and  the  organic  below  consciousness  whose 
organ  is  biology,  or  rather  biological  physics.  And  these 
represent  two  stages  in  the  application  of  the  dialectic  of 
reflection.  Natural  science,  embodying  itself  in  the  form  of 
the  two  disciplines,  physics  and  biological  physics,  seeks 
to  construe  the  movements  of  inorganic  and  organic  nature 
in  terms  of  natural  causation.  The  metaphysical  problem 
here  will  arise  in  connection  with  the  most  ultimate  con- 


chap.  I.  THE  DIALECTIC.  155 

ceptions  of  physics  and  biology,  and  it  will  show  how  the 
metaphysical  insight  is  progressive,  leading  to  richer  re- 
sults as  we  pass  from  the  field  of  physics  to  that  of 
organisms. 

The  appearance  of  consciousness  marks  a  revolution  in 
the  character  of  the  world.  The  problem  of  the  dual  series 
below  consciousness  is  solved  by  subordinating  the  organ- 
ism to  its  environment  and  translating  its  movements  into 
terms  of  response  and  correspondence.  We  shall  see, 
however,  that  the  corresponding  problem  after  the  world 
has  become  qualified  by  consciousness  is  not  so  simple  and 
very  stubbornly  refuses  to  yield  to  treatment.  The  truth 
is,  consciousness,  when  it  becomes  overt  and  explicit,  brings 
into  the  world  its  dual  standpoints  out  of  which  develop 
the  movements  of  natural  science  and  metaphysics,  and  the 
duality  of  series  arises  in  connection  with  each  and  de- 
mands both  a  scientific  and  a  metaphysical  explanation. 
This  will  have  to  be  remembered  at  the  proper  time  and 
the  two  aspects  of  the  problem  carefully  distinguished. 
Now,  the  science  which  deals  with  the  conscious  world  is 
psychology,  and  the  problem  of  the  double  series  on  its 
scientific  side  will  be  a  problem  for  the  psychologist.  But 
whatever  conclusion  psychology  may  reach  will,  in  the 
nature  of  the  case,  not  be  final.  It  will  be  a  solution  that 
w^ill  take  the  fact  of  the  duality  as  an  ultimate  and  will 
seek  to  construe  the  connection  of  the  two  series,  the  mental 
and  the  physical.  Moreover,  the  principle  of  the  solution 
will  be  that  of  natural  causation,  from  which  it  does  not 
necessarily  follow  that  the  connection  of  the  mental  and 
physical  will  be  interpreted  as  a  causal  relation,  but  rather 
that  the  interpretation  reached,  whatever  form  it  may  take, 
must  satisfy  the  requirements  of  a  causal  explanation. 
The  metaphysical  problem  will  be  that  of  the  duality  itself, 
—  Is  this  final,  and  if  not  what  is  its  final  explanation  and 
what  reality  does  it  symbolize? 

In  the  world  qualified  by  consciousness  beyond  the  limit 
of  psychology  proper,  to  which  falls  the  whole  business  of 


156  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

dealing  with  the  individual  consciousness  in  its  complex 
relations,  there  lies  the  field  of  social  movements  and  phe- 
nomena. This  includes  a  psychological  division  dealing  with 
the  individual  as  a  social  unit,  and  a  social  division  proper, 
dealing  with  groups  of  social  units.  To  this  whole  field, 
adopting  the  terminology  of  Herbert  Spencer,  let  us  apply 
the  phrase  super-organic.  The  world  of  social  activities 
will  thus  stand  related  to  the  world  of  living  organisms  as 
super-organic,  not  in  the  sense  that  the  living  organism 
is  transcended.  This  is  manifestly  false.  The  social  is 
super-organic  (1)  in  the  sense  that  its  movements  are 
ab  initio,  phenomena  of  consciousness,  (2)  by  virtue  of  the 
fact  that  they  are  inter-organic  in  their  bases,  involving  the 
interaction  of  groups  of  living  and  conscious  beings  as  their 
organ  proper.  Now  the  natural  science  which  deals  with 
this  type  of  phenomena  is  rightly  called  sociology,  its  aim 
being  to  investigate  the  natural  causes  and  conditions  of 
social  movements  and  in  the  light  of  these  to  determine 
their  most  fundamental  laws.  The  metaphysical  inquiry 
will  arise  here  out  of  the  question  whether  the  fundamental 
requirements  of  the  individual  nature  of  man  are  fully  met 
in  the  social  life  and  organism.  This  will  lead  to  the 
treatment  of  some  ultra-social  aspects  of  the  individual 
nature,  and  the  problem  will  arise  whether  there  are  not 
ultra-social  demands  arising  out  of  the  individual's  con- 
sciousness which  can  be  realized  only  in  a  world  that  is  not 
merely  temporal  but  eternal. 

We  are  thus  finally  ushered  into  the  world  of  religion, 
The  phenomena  of  the  religious  consciousness  in  their 
universal  historical,  as  well  as  in  their  individual  aspects, 
present  a  well-marked  phase  of  the  world  of  consciousness. 
As  such  they  supply  a  legitimate  object  of  investigation  to 
both  natural  science  and  metaphysics.  It  is  to  be  remem- 
bered here  as  elsewhere  that  we  cannot  hold  natural  science 
responsible  for  a  complete  theory  of  religion.  What  science 
may  legitimately  aim  at  is  (1)  from  a  comparative  study 
of  religions  to  determine  their  common  essential  characters 


chap.  i.  THE  DIALECTIC.  157 

and,  (2)  from  a  study  of  their  history  to  determine  the 
natural  causes  and  conditions  of  their  rise  and  develop- 
ment. Having  accomplished  this,  natural  science  will  find 
itself  practically  helpless  in  view  of  most  of  the  great 
problems  regarding  the  nature  of  the  world  and  the  destiny 
of  man  which  arise  out  of  the  religious  consciousness. 
The  reason  for  this  is  not  far  to  seek.  The  fundamental 
insight  of  religion  relates  man  consciously  to  some  tran- 
scendent reality.  This  insight  is  like  a  great  spring  or 
fountain  out  of  which  wells  the  consciousness  of  the  eternal 
and  those  problems  of  freedom,  the  soul's  nature  and  des- 
tiny, and  God,  which  in  their  ensemble  make  up  the  staple 
of  the  spiritual  life  and  interest  of  man.  For  the  solution 
of  these  problems  the  observational  standpoint  of  natural 
science  is  not  well  adapted  and  its  principle  of  natural 
causation  seems  to  become  a  dumb  oracle.  The  spiritual 
problems  are  all  problems  arising  out  of  man's  funda- 
mental agency  and  they  have  meaning  only  in  connection 
with  the  struggle  he  is  making  to  work  out  his  destiny. 
They  are  all  essentially  individual  in  their  character  and  as 
a  group  they  embody  the  interest  of  that  aspect  of  the 
individual  life  which  transcends  the  social  and  pushes  out 
into  the  eternal.  The  burden  of  their  solution  will  be 
found,  therefore,  to  rest  mainly  on  the  metaphysical 
method.  For  while  in  the  world  of  pure  physics  meta- 
physics must  perforce  play  a  subordinate  role,  in  the  world 
of  the  higher  spiritual  issues  of  consciousness,  on  the  con- 
trary, the  word  of  counsel  belongs  to  metaphysics  while  the 
oracle  of  science  becomes  largely  silent. 


CHAPTER  II. 

PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES. 

Two  problems  of  fundamental  importance  arise  in  con- 
nection with  the  world  of  physical  activities,  the  one 
epistemological  and  somewhat  formal  in  its  character,  the 
other  pertaining  to  the  matter  of  science  and  metaphysics. 
The  first  question  is  that  of  the  method  by  which  conscious- 
ness defines  the  world  objectively  and  reduces  it  to  intelligi- 
ble forms.  We  have  already  shown  in  the  first  part  of  this 
treatise  that  objectivity  is  given  immediately  in  present 
experience,  so  that  our  search  for  the  object  takes  the  form 
of  a  process  of  definition  of  objective  material.  Now  in  my 
Foundations  of  Knowledge,  under  the  designation  of  Cate- 
gories, I  have  endeavored  to  show  with  some  detail  how  the 
various  forms  of  objective  existence  arise  in  consciousness. 
The  substance  of  the  doctrine  developed  there  I  shall  try  to 
state  here  in  a  few  sentences.  The  knowing  consciousness 
reaches  its  primary  apprehension  of  the  object  through  the 
medium  of  certain  fundamental  terms  which  we,  following 
Kant,  have  named  categories.  These  categories  are  two- 
sided  and  mediating:  as  species  of  consciousness  they  are 
simply  primary  forms  of  conscious  function;  whereas, 
objectively,  they  are  defining  forms  of  objective  existence. 
The  category  is  thus  at  the  same  time  a  mode  of  conscious 
activity  and  also  a  defining  principle  of  objective  existence. 
It  is  aroused  into  activity  by  certain  primary  experiences, 
the  forms  of  space  and  time  arising  in  connection  with 

158 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  159 

those  experiences  which  call  forth  the  first  acts  of  attention 
in  perception,  while  the  dynamic  forms  by  which  the  world 
is  reduced  to  a  system  of  substantial  existences  and  causal 
agencies  arise  in  connection  with  those  primary  expe- 
riences of  a  deeper  kind  which  are  connected  with  the 
exercise  of  our  conscious  agency.  If,  then,  we  put  the 
epistemological  question,  how  we  came  to  have  an  objective 
world  defined  in  the  forms  in  which  it  presents  itself  to  us, 
the  only  answer  we  can  expect  to  find  for  such  a  question  is 
one  that  points  us  to  the  fact.  Consciousness  itself  is  the 
only  door  through  which  we  can  apprehend  anything  and 
consciousness  has  certain  primary  ways  of  reacting  on  the 
world  and  defining  it  objectively,  which,  taken  together, 
constitute  the  most  fundamental  forms  of  knowing  as  well 
as  the  most  primary  aspects  of  objective  existence. 

Assuming  now  that  the  epistemological  question  has 
been  answered  when  the  method  of  consciousness  in  realiz- 
ing the  world  has  been  pointed  out,  and  that  the  question 
why  is  futile,  let  us  turn  to  the  problem  of  more  direct 
scientific  and  metaphysical  interest.  We  divide  this  prob- 
lem into  two  questions,  (1)  What  is  the  fundamental 
conception  of  the  world  that  underlies  its  physical  investi- 
gation, and  (2)  What  are  the  essential  elements  in  physical 
method?  For  the  first  question  we  have  already  found  a 
partial  answer.  The  physical  conception  of  the  world  is 
one  that  represents  it  under  the  fundamental  notion  of 
phenomena  and  underlying  grounds  or  forces.  We  have 
already  seen  that  the  notion  of  grounds  in  physics  is  that 
of  underlying  and  permanent  substances,  and  that  these 
are  translatable  into  the  material  concepts  of  physics ; 
into  atoms,  forces  or  ethers.  Physical  substances  are  the 
substantial  agents  of  all  the  changes  or  phenomena  with 
which  the  science  deals.  These  substances  are  represented 
as  causally  related  to  the  movements  of  the  physical  world 
which  are  conceived  to  be,  not  real  existences  in  themselves, 
but  symbols  of  real  existences  whose  inner  nature  they  do 
not  reveal.     Now  we  have  seen  that  the  causal  relation, 


160  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

which  we  call  the  link  between  the  underlying  substances 
and  the  phenomena  which  symbolize  them,  may  be  repre- 
sented in  two  different  ways.  The  phenomenon  may  be 
taken  as  an  abstract  symbol  and  treated  as  the  effect  of 
causal  forces  or  agents  which  underlie  it ;  or  it  may  be  taken 
concretely  as  the  symbolic  effect  of  an  agent  or  nature  which 
is  represented  as  immanent  in  the  symbolic  changes  and  as 
constituting  their  persistent  and  self-maintaining  ground, 
Thus,  to  recall  the  illustration  already  used,  symbol  a  is 
related  to  symbol  b  as  its  cause  because  some  hidden  nature 
x  persists  as  the  common  substance  of  both.  It  is  clear, 
however,  that  whichever  one  of  these  alternative  notions 
of  linkage  we  may  choose  to  adopt,  there  will  be  involved 
the  presumption  of  a  real  dependence  of  the  phenomenon 
on  the  substance  which  it  represents. 

This  doctrine,  which  is  simply  a  restatement  of  con- 
clusions already  reached  in  earlier  discussions,  we  now  pro- 
pose to  carry  further  into  the  field  of  the  working  concepts 
of  physics.  If  we  ask  the  modern  physical  investigator 
what  the  most  fundamental  concepts  of  his  science  are,  he 
will  very  promptly  reply,  matter  and  motion.  If  we  ask  a 
second  question,  which  of  these  concepts  is  of  most  imme- 
diate importance  to  the  science,  he  will  answer,  motion.  The 
whole  of  physics  is  a  calculus  of  motions.  And  he  will 
point  to  the  kinetic  theory  as  an  illustration  of  the  tendency 
to  reduce  physics  practically  to  a  science  of  motion.  Now 
the  aim  here  is  not  primarily  critical  but  constructive,  and 
what  we  have  in  mind  to  do  is  to  show  how  this  tendency 
is  related  to  what  we  have  defined  as  the  notion  which  under- 
lies physics  and  determines  the  primary  character  of  the 
world  with  which  it  deals.  A  little  reflection  will  show 
that  the  concepts  of  matter  and  motion  are  very  closely 
related  to  the  notions  of  ground  and  phenomena.  For 
hi  of  ion  is  clearly  the  phenomenal  term,  while  matter  is  a 
name  for  that  whose  nature  is  largely  hidden.  But  neither 
term  is  quite  identical  with  its  correspondent.  The  phe- 
nomenon of  physics  is  a  motion,  and  a  motion  is  a  symbol 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  161 

of  a  hidden  real,  but  a  motion  is  a  phenomenon  stamped 
with  a  definable  nature.  It  is  not  a  mere  effect  or  change, 
but  it  is  a  change  in  space  and  time,  a  change  that  has 
qualified  in  an  order  of  spatial  positions  as  well  as  in 
a  scale  of  points  of  sequence  in  the  series  of  time.  This 
double  qualification  invests  it  with  definable  character  and 
makes  it  susceptible  to  mathematical  calculation.  And  it 
is  right  here  in  the  quantitatively  definable  quality  of  its 
phenomena  that  physics  becomes  an  exact  science  and 
opens  up  a  field  for  strict  mathematical  determination. 
Just  as  little  can  the  physicist 's  matter  be  identified  \\  i  1 1 1 
the  notion  of  indeterminate  ground  or  substance.  The 
character  of  the  phenomena  with  which  physics  deals  is 
such  as  to  necessitate  certain  presumptions  regarding  the 
nature  of  the  substances  which  underlie  them,  and  these  pre- 
suppositions will  arise  from  two  different  sources,  (1)  quali- 
ties which  the  phenomena  do  not  possess,  but  which  must  be 
supposed  to  exist  somewhere  in  order  that  science  may  be 
possible,  (2)  qualities  which  the  phenomena  do  possess  and 
which  are  prescriptive  as  to  the  notions  we  must  form  re- 
garding their  grounds.  Now  regarding  the  first  set  of  quali- 
ties, it  is  clear  that  motions  do  not  carry  with  them  the 
guarantee  of  their  own  stability  nor  do  they  constitute  their 
own  medium.  Physics  presupposes  a  medium  of  motion  in 
which  motion  may  be  initiated  and  conserved,  and  it  pre- 
supposes the  stability  of  that  medium.  Consequently 
matter,  which  is  a  name  for  the  ground  of  motion,  must 
supply  these  demands,  and  it  is  forthwith  denned  as  per- 
manent, indestructible,  and  as  constituting  a  frictionless 
mi  (Hum  for  the  propagation  of  motion.  If  matter  were  to 
be  conceived  as  interfering  with  motion  in  any  way  or  as 
retarding  it,  like  the  traditional  matter  of  Plato  which  stub- 
bornly resisted  organization,  the  certitude  of  science  would 
be  completely  destroyed.  But  in  the  second  place,  phe- 
nomena possess  certain  qualities  which  are  prescriptive  as  to 
their  grounds.  In  their  fundamental  character  as  effects 
of  underlying  causes  they  are  determined  as  mechanically 
11 


162  SYNTHESIS.  pakt  ii. 

rather  than  teleologically  related  to  their  grounds.  But 
in  their  character  as  motions  they  are  determined  as 
spatial  phenomena,  and  this  must  be  taken  account  of  in 
the  effort  to  represent  the  mode  of  activity  which  they 
embody.  If  we  are  to  represent  the  activities  of  things 
as  taking  the  form  of  motions  in  space,  what  implication 
does  this  involve  ?  A  motion  in  space  is  always  from  a  to  b 
and  on  to  c,  and  so  on  to  the  end  of  the  chapter.  Now  a 
and  b  as  points  in  space  are  external  to  one  another,  so 
that  if  anything  at  a  is  to  effect  b  it  must  do  it  externally 
and  from  its  own  position.  Let  us  suppose  a  and  b  to  be 
points  in  space  which  are  filled  wTith  motion,  that  is,  as 
moving  points.  If,  now,  a  is  to  affect  b,  or  the  reverse, 
it  must  be  by  external  impact.  The  movements  in  a  and 
b  must  collide  or  they  must  come  together  at  various  angles 
of  incidence,  and  the  effect  must  be  either  rebound,  in 
which  motions  are  exchanged,  or  composition,  in1  which 
the  resulting  movement  will  be  compounded  of  the  separate 
motions  of  a  and  b.  The  representation  given  here  is  that 
of  a  purely  physical  phenomenon  where  the  quantity  of  the 
movements  may  be  determined.  And  the  implications  which 
are  most  clear  and  obvious  are  that  these  motions  are  the 
natural  effects  of  existents  which  are  many  rather  than  one, 
and  that  they  are  in  a  state  of  causal  interaction.  If  the 
phenomena  were  chemical  where  certain  changes  of  quality 
arise  in  connection  with  the  movements,  these  implications 
would  be  the  same.  Neither  physics  nor  chemistry  can  get 
along  with  one  substance.  They  may  find  their  ultimate 
terms  reducible  to  one  species,  but  of  this  species  there 
must  be  a  multitude  rather  than  one.  The  character  of 
physical  movements  requires  this.  It  also  requires  that 
this  multitude  should  be  in  dynamic  interaction  in  order 
that  the  existence  of  the  movements  may  be  intelligible. 

Returning,  then,  to  the  consideration  of  matter,  we  have 
found  that  this  term  in  physics  represents  the  notion  of 
substance  qualified  by  a  number  of  properties  which  physics 
ascribes  to  it.     In  the  first  place  this  matter  is  represented 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  163 

as  stable  and  as  the  causal  ground  of  motion  and  in  this 
sense  simply  as  the  bearer  of  motor  attributes.  But  these 
motor  attributes  have  been  further  defined  in  view  of  the 
nature  of  physical  motion.  That  of  stable  ground  is  trans- 
lated into  the  notion  of  a  stable  medium  of  motion,  while 
the  causal  function  itself  is  refined  into  the  notion  of  an 
absolutely  frictionless  ether  in  which  motions  once  origi- 
nated will  find  nothing  to  retard  or  diminish  them,  so  that 
they  are  theoretically  assured  of  perpetual  existence.  This 
continuity  of  motion  on  its  negative  side  is  inertia,  the 
quality  by  which  any  physical  agent  when  at  rest  or  in 
motion,  continues  in  that  condition  until  put  into  a  differ- 
ent state  by  the  action  of  some  force  external  to  it.  In  the 
notion  of  inertia,  then,  we  have  the  developed  concept  of 
mechanical  as  distinguished  from  and  excluding  teleolog- 
ical  agency.  Matter  as  inert  represents  pure  mechanical 
activity  and  the  complete  absence  of  any  form  of  movement 
that  is  self -initiating.  If,  now,  we  turn  to  the  notion  of 
matter  which  is  embodied  in  the  conception  of  a  plurality  of 
substances  in  causal  interaction,  it  will  be  found  that  this 
gives  us  substantially  the  modern  dynamic  conception 
which  came  in  with  Boscovitch  and  Leibnitz,  a  concep- 
tion which  reduces  material  substance  to  a  plurality  of 
dynamically  interacting  forces,  while  the  movements  of 
the  world  are  represented  as  their  symbolic  effects.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  theory  which  reduces  matter,  or  tends  to 
reduce  it,  simply  to  an  ideally  frictionless  and  stable 
medium  for  motion,  may  be  called  static.  As  a  matter  ol 
fact  we  find  physical  conceptions  oscillating  between  the 
static  and  the  dynamic  poles,  and  it  is  perhaps  impossible 
to  predict  how  the  final  state  of  stable  equilibrium  will  be 
reached. 

We  are  concerned  here  not  so  much  with  the  details  as 
with  the  foundations  of  the  physicist's  creed.  And  the 
points  we  wish  to  emphasize  are :  ( 1 )  that  the  whole  phys- 
ical doctrine  of  matter  and  motion  which  has  been  worked 
out   by   the   modern   physicists   with   such   infinite   pains 


154  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

stands  as  the  qualified  construction  which  physical  reflec- 
tion is  led  to  put  on  the  more  fundamental  notions  of 
(/round  and  phenomena  on  which  its  whole  doctrine  of 
the  world  is  found  to  rest.  Neither  term  of  this  duality  is 
left  unmodified.  We  have  seen  that  in  motion  the  phe- 
nomena take  on  a  definite  character  and  become  susceptible 
of  exact  measurement.  In  matter,  likewise,  the  concept  of 
ground  is  qualified  by  the  ascription  to  it  of  qualities  which 
render  it  an  ideal  bearer  of  the  hind  of  motion  with  which 
physics  concerns  itself.  Now  it  cannot  be  denied  that  in 
yielding  to  the  necessity  of  qualification,  physics  has  in  a 
sense  phenomenalized  its  ground  and  in  a  sense  proved 
untrue  to  its  profession  of  ignorance  of  the  nature  of  this 
ground.  A  certain  consciousness  of  this  is  betrayed  in  the 
claim  made  in  some  quarters  that  both  terms  of  physics  are 
purely  phenomenal  and  that  science  has  nothing  to  do  with 
the  notion  of  ground.  But  in  order  to  divest  itself  of  all 
complications  with  that  which  is  deeper  than  the  phe- 
nomenal it  would  be  necessary  to  resort  to  more  radical 
measures  than  have  yet  been  proposed. 

We  are  thus  led  to  the  second  observation,  which  is 
that  by  no  possibility  can  physical  science  dispense  with 
the  notion  of  physical  agency  embodied  in  the  principle 
of  natural  causation,  without  losing  most  of  its  value  as  a 
theory  of  the  world.  The  temptation  in  physics  is  not  now, 
as  it  once  was,  to  substitute  final  for  efficient  causes.  It  is 
rather  to  dismiss  altogether  the  notion  of  causal  agency. 
The  idea  that  anything  should  really  be  able  to  bring  about 
a  change  in  anything  else  seems  most  abhorrent.  Of 
course  the  temptation  to  this  exclusion  is  not  so  strong  with 
the  advocates  of  the  dynamic  theory  who  seem  committed 
to  the  notion  of  efficiency  in  the  form  of  dynamic  interac- 
tion. But  it  will  have  its  full  force  with  the  advocate  of 
the  static  view.  Here  the  scientific  imagination  seems  to 
exhaust  itself  in  the  effort  to  conceive  a  medium  so  un- 
stable that  an  infinitely  small  transcendental  frog  would 
be  capable  of  initiating  in  it  an  infinitely  large  movement. 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  165 

We  admit  the  validity  of  this  effort,  but  the  fact  remains 
that  the  frog,  though  indeed  "such  a  little  one,"  is  yet  an 
agent  and  performs  a  causal  function.  In  order  to  really 
succeed  in  expelling  the  notion  of  natural  causation  it 
would  be  necessary  to  imagine  a  medium  so  sensitive  that 
it  could  initiate  movements  by  its  own  impulse.1  In  short, 
the  alternative  to  natural  causation,  if  we  exclude  final 
cause,  is  self -initiation  and  this  would  transport  us  immedi- 
ately into  the  very  heart  of  metaphysics.  The  concept  of 
agency  embodied  in  the  principle  of  natural  causation  is  so 
fundamental  that  without  its  guidance  the  fear  would  be 
well  grounded  that  physical  reflection  would  be  left  on  a  sea 
of  speculation,  as  helpless  as  a  craft  that  has  neither  com- 
pass nor  rudder.  In  truth,  the  over-refinement  of  physical 
speculation  seems  to  be  tending  in  this  very  direction. 
The  denial  of  natural  causation  seems  to  carry  with  it  the 
feeling  that  physics  is  absolved  from  all  responsibility  to 
the  nature  of  things  as  realities  and  that  it  may  abstract 
the  purely  phenomenal  terms  of  its  calculation  from  any 
living  commerce  with  their  grounds.  Its  motions  thus 
become  abstract  symbols  like  the  terms  of  mathemat- 
ics, and  it  in  fact  seeks  to  assert  for  itself  all  the  preroga- 
tives of  a  mathematic.  But  it  should  bear  in  mind  that  the 
foundations  of  mathematics  cannot  be  usurped  and  that  its 
own  foundations  commit  it  to  a  conception  of  the  world  in 
which  its  phenomena  stand  as  symbolic  effects  of  underly- 
ing causes ;  that  to  prove  untrue  to  these  foundations  would 
involve  the  surrender  of  the  claim  that  physical  science  can 
be  taken  as  in  any  sense  a  construction  of  reality. 

The  whole  method  of  physics  is  one  that  involves  three 
moments,  inductive  observation,  causal  explanation,  and 
mathematical  determination.  The  first  moment  embraces 
the  whole  first-hand  relation  to  facts  in  which  phenomena 
are  selected  and  generalized  into  what  Mill  calls  empirical 

1  The  new  discoveries  in  Physics  mark  an  approximation  to  this 
point,  but  to  actually  cross  the  line  would  require  a  qualitative 
change  of  nature. 


166  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

laws.  Mill  has  shown  that  this  process  of  generalization 
is  one  in  which  observation  is  transcended,  inasmuch  as  it 
involves  an  inference  of  the  universal  from  a  limited  sphere 
of  observation.  And  yet  it  is  absolutely  essential  to  the 
existence  of  science.  This  dilemma  led  Mill  to  see  that  a 
second  step  must  needs  be  taken  which  he  called  the 
grounding  of  induction.  Superficially,  Mill  seems  to  make 
his  appeal  here  to  the  uncritical  judgments  of  spontaneous 
experience,  so  that  it  would  appear  to  call  in  the  plain 
man  to  settle  an  issue  for  science.  But  Mill  does  not  in 
truth  proceed  so  uncritically.  His  real  solution  of  the 
question  of  grounding  is  found  in  his  doctrine  of  universal 
causation.  The  generalizations  of  observation  do  not  rest 
on  the  loose  uniformities  of  ordinary  experience,  but  rather 
on  a  specific  kind  of  uniformity;  namely,  the  uniform 
presence  in  the  world  of  a  cause  or  determining  antece- 
dent wherever  any  change  occurs.  True,  Mill  does  not  give 
any  coherent  account  of  the  universality  of  cause  itself, 
but  he  is  clear  in  the  recognition  that  cause  is  the  prin- 
ciple which  rationalizes  the  foundations  of  science.  An 
empirical  result  only  becomes  a  real  law  when  it  is  seen  to 
express  a  uniformity  of  causation. 

Now  it  is  possible  thus  to  translate  our  inductive  ob- 
servations into  laws  which  express  the  causal  determination 
of  nature,  and  up  to  this  point  Mill  is  a  reliable  guide. 
But  here  his  insight  very  strangely  breaks  down  and  his 
doctrine  of  method  remains  a  fragment.  What  Mill  failed 
to  see  is  what  may  be  called  the  third  important  step  in 
physical  method,  the  step  which  we  have  called  mathe- 
matical determination.  Let  us  suppose  that  Newton,  in 
the  process  of  reflection  that  led  him  to  the  discovery  and 
statement  of  the  law  of  gravitation,  had  simply  followed 
Mill's  conception  of  method  to  its  end,  what  would  have 
been  the  result?  Newton  had  before  his  mind  those  gen- 
eralizations, called  laws  of  motion,  which  had  been  worked 
out  before  his  time.  These  laws  were  empirical  and  de- 
scriptive rather  than  explanatory.     Moreover,  they  were 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  167 

fragmentary  and  pointed  to  some  common  principle.  New- 
ton was  in  quest  of  this  universal  principle  and  he  found 
the  suggestion  of  it  in  such  a  simple  phenomenon  as  objects 
falling  to  the  ground  when  unsupported.  The  principle 
itself  was  a  universalization  of  what  Newton  conceived  to 
be  the  cause  of  this,  namely,  the  power  which  matter  has  of 
drawing  other  matter  toward  it.  The  principle  of  gravi- 
tation or  attraction  thus  expresses  a  real  law  of  natural 
causation.  Now  this  is  as  far  as  Mill's  method  would  lead 
the  investigation.  Aside  from  certain  processes  of  testing 
and  verification,  the  Mill-method  leaves  its  results  in  this 
vague,  undetermined  form.  There  is,  however,  a  further 
question  to  which  all  this  leads  up :  namely,  What  is  the 
modus  of  this  law;  can  the  how  of  its  operation  be  stated? 
This  is  the  question  for  mathematical  determination.  We 
have  seen  in  our  study  of  motion  that  the  species  of  move- 
ment with  which  physics  is  concerned  is  one  that  is  suscep- 
tible of  quantitative  definition.  By  applying  the  mathe- 
matical calculus  to  the  quantitative  aspects  of  motion,  the 
law  that  embodies  a  causal  determination  of  its  uniformity 
may  be  further  defined  so  as  to  express  the  exact  mode  in 
which  the  uniformity  is  realized.  Newton  fulfills  the  last 
requirement  of  method  in  quantifying  his  law  so  that  it 
not  only  asserts  the  presence  everywhere  of  causal  force  in 
matter  to  attract  other  matter,  but  informs  us  also  that  the 
operation  of  this  force  is  everywhere  measurable,  directly, 
in  terms  of  mass,  and  inversely,  in  terms  of  the  square  of 
the  distance. 

The  three  steps  make  up  the  whole  of  physical  method. 
But  we  have  presented  in  the  practice  of  physical  investi- 
gation the  phenomenon  of  elements  of  method  falling  into 
virtual  disuse.  I  do  not  now  refer  to  those  branches  of 
science  in  which  mathematical  determination  is  largely  im- 
practicable. In  physics  itself  a  tendency  is  found  toward 
alternative  conceptions  of  method.  Let  us  call  the  ex- 
ponents  of   these   tendencies   respectively   formalists   and 


168  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

dynamists.  The  formalistic  tendency  is  one  that  throws 
causal  explanation  into  the  background  or  casts  it  out  alto- 
gether, and  treats  the  processes  of  inductive  observation 
and  mathematical  determination  as  alone  vital.  It  is  clear 
that  in  this  conception  of  method  we  have  the  view  of  those 
who  hold  that  science  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  notion 
of  cause,  substance  or  interaction;  that  its  whole  business 
is  with  the  motions  of  things  in  space  and  time,  and  that 
it  has  performed  its  whole  Pflicht  when  it  has  discovered 
and  calculated  the  laws  of  motion;  meaning  by  laws,  ob- 
served uniformities.  In  this  view  the  dynamic  constitu- 
tion of  the  world  is  not  denied:  it  is  simply  ignored. 
Standing  out  in  clear  opposition  to  the  tendency  of  the 
formalists,  is  that  of  the  dynamists,  in  whose  conception 
of  method  the  notion  of  effective  agency  stands  central. 
The  dynamists  deny  neither  inductive  observation  nor 
mathematical  determination.  But  the  supreme  accent  is 
placed  on  that  element  in  method  which  we  have  called 
causal  explanation.  We  do  not  mean  to  say  that  cause  is 
conceived  here  in  any  crude  sense.  Quite  the  reverse. 
The  notion  as  it  is  conceived  is  translatable  into  one  of 
dynamic  activity,  a  kind  of  energizing  that  symbolizes  it- 
self in  changes  which  we  call  motions.  These  motions  are 
thus  the  symbolized  effects  or  manifestations  of  an  efficiency 
which  underlies  them ;  or  which  from  another  point  of  view, 
is  immanent  in  them  as  their  real  nature.  The  physicist 
of  this  type  regards  his  motions  as  symbols  of  real  sub- 
stances and  as  effects  of  forces  that  themselves  do  not 
appear.  Thus  electrical  phenomena  are  regarded  as  the 
movements  of  a  real  agent  called  electricity  which,  never- 
theless, does  not  reveal  its  inner  nature  so  that  we  may  say 
what  electricity  is  in  itself.  This  dynamic  conception 
determines  the  whole  method,  because  in  its  light  the  inves- 
tigator cannot  divorce  his  process  from  reality.  His 
investigation  is  either  revealing  to  him  the  truth  about 
things  or  it  is  of  no  value.     To  him  the  phenomena  he  is 


chap.  II.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  K39 

gathering  and  generalizing  by  induction  are  symbols  of  the 
operation  of  dynamic  agencies  and  his  mathematical  de- 
termination of  the  modus  of  this  operation  is  one  that 
keeps  him  close  to  the  pulse  of  the  real  world. 

We  hold  no  brief  here  for  the  trial  of  the  case  between 
these  two  rival  conceptions  of  physical  method,  but  having 
tried  to  indicate  the  fundamental  concepts  and  lines  of 
cleavage  in  physical  procedure,  we  are  now  ready  to  con- 
sider the  connection  of  the  physical  investigation  with 
metaphysics  and  the  mode  in  which  the  metaphysical  impli- 
cations of  science  appeal  to  our  interest.  We  have  said 
that  the  notion  of  natural  causation  as  a  form  of  agency 
stands  central  in  natural  science.  But  here  in  physics  we 
have  come  upon  a  tendency  to  eliminate  the  notion  of  cause 
from  scientific  procedure.  This  calls  for  some  further 
consideration.  Taking  the  two  opposing  tendencies  as 
expressing  opposite  attitudes  toward  natural  causation, 
the  case  may  be  put  as  follows.  Physical  science  either 
recognizes  causation  as  central  or  it  does  not.  If  it  does 
not,  its  tendency  then  is  to  minimize  the  notion  and  prac- 
tically to  eliminate  it.  The  elimination  of  cause  tends,  we 
have  seen,  to  a  formal  conception  of  the  aim  of  physics 
which  leads  to  the  abstraction  of  its  method  and  to  its 
divorce  from  the  real  world.  The  real  world  is  a  sphere 
of  agency,  but  formal  physics  casts  the  notion  of  agency 
out  of  doors.  On  the  other  hand,  if  physics  recognizes 
causation  as  central  it  is  because  it  embodies  the  notion  of 
agency  on  which  physics  as  a  dynamic  science  is  founded. 
The  essentials  of  that  notion  appear  in  the  fact  that  it 
separates  the  moment  of  efficiency  which  connects  the  agent 
with  its  symbol  in  the  world  of  effects,  from  the  moments 
of  prevision  and  finality.  Whatever  else  physics  may  or 
may  not  assume  regarding  its  phenomena,  it  may  not 
assume  that  they  are  products  of  intention  and  foresight. 
It  must  treat  them  under  the  notion  of  an  agency  thai  is 
unqualified   by  any   elements  of  finality.     The   results  in 


170  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

physics  are  to  be  connected  with  forces  whose  operations 
are  external  and  calculable  rather  than  with  agencies  which 
are  internal  and  incalculable. 

Let  us  consider  how  the  metaphysical  demand  arises  in 
connection  with  both  of  these  physical  conceptions.  Tak- 
ing that  of  the  formalists,  who  abstract  largely  from  the 
world  of  reality,  it  is  a  characteristic  of  this  concept  of  the 
science  that  it  drops  one  after  another,  in  detail,  all  ques- 
tions pertaining  to  the  nature  of  reality.  It  becomes  more 
and  more  bound  up  in  the  conception  of  a  world-automaton 
in  which  every  movement  is  explained  when  it  has  been 
exactly  stated  in  terms  of  quantity;  that  is,  when  it  has 
been  accurately  measured,  and  in  which  all  apparent  agents 
are  mere  puppets  and  by-spectators  of  the  show.  In  thus 
conceiving  its  world,  physics  does  not  deny  the  real  world 
of  agency,  but  simply  thrusts  it  beyond  its  own  pale.  It  is 
there,  however,  and  if  not  science,  then  some  other  disci- 
pline must  take  it  up  and  determine  what  can  be  known 
about  it.  The  formal  conception  of  physics  thus  only 
increases  the  demand  for  metaphysics  and  the  responsi- 
bility which  rests  on  it.  It  has  simply  thrown  out  agency  as 
scientifically  unmanageable  and  the  demand  becomes  urgent 
that  metaphysics  should  develop  a  doctrine  of  agency  in 
general  and  one  that  will  ground  an  intelligent  distinction 
between  its  physical  and  mental  forms.  For  on  this  dis- 
tinction will  rest  a  rational  theory  of  the  real  wrorld.  The 
formal  physicist  cannot  deny  metaphysics  without  thereby 
regarding  his  denial  of  agency  as  absolute.  But  this  would 
be  impossible.  The  physicist  may  become  completely 
agnostic  so  that  his  insight  does  not  give  him  any  hint  of 
reality  and  he  may  see  fit  to  confine  knowledge  to  the 
boundaries  of  his  own  world-automaton,  but  he  will  not 
deny  the  existence  of  a  real  world  with  its  problems,  outside 
of  the  circle  to  which  he  has  limited  himself,  nor  the  right 
of  some  discipline  to  make  this  world  and  its  problems  an 
object  of  investigation.  Moreover,  the  formal  physicist 
does  not  deny  the  distinction  between  the  mechanical  and 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  171 

the  teleological,  although  he  confines  himself  to  the  mechan- 
ical. His  own  consciousness  reveals  to  him  a  kind  of 
activity  that  is  previsive  and  end-seeking,  and  it  cannot 
help  striking  him,  as  it  strikes  all  reflecting  minds,  that 
this  type  of  activity  may  have  place  outside  the  narrow 
confines  of  his  own  consciousness.  His  method  excludes 
this  type  strictly  from  physical  data,  but  it  does  not 
exclude  it  from  the  world  of  reality.  If  the  teleological 
form  of  activity  which  we  realize  in  consciousness  supplies 
a  world-problem,  it  is  clear,  then,  that  the  investigation  of 
it  will  be  ultra-physical.  From  the  standpoint  of  formal- 
ists physics,  then,  it  cannot  be  denied  that  a  theory  of  the 
world,  in  order  to  be  more  than  fragmentary,  to  be  in  any 
sense  complete,  will  involve  a  synthesis  of  physics  with 
metaphysics. 

The  concept  of  physics  apparently  most  inimical  to 
metaphysics  is  thus  found  to  be  most  friendly.  From  its 
point  of  view  metaphysics  cannot  be  denied ;  it  can  only  be 
wet-blanketed  with  the  plea  of  agnosticism  which  involves 
a  problem  not  here  at  issue.  Naturally  the  patron  of 
metaphysics  will  anticipate  a  more  friendly  reception  in 
the  camp  of  the  dynamic  physicists.  For  here  the  claims 
of  agency  are  recognized  and  made  central.  Dynamic 
physics  does  not  doubt  that  the  world  is  a  system  of 
agencies,  but  the  line  of  cleavage  arises  within  the  field 
of  agency  between  the  two  distinct  types  with  which  we  are 
already  familiar.  Dynamic  physics  finds  itself  strictly 
limited  to  the  type  of  agency  embodied  in  natural  causa- 
tion which  is  non-previsive  and  mechanical.  But  it  is 
familiar  with  the  opposite  type  which  is  previsive  and 
end-seeking  and  which  is  central  in  the  deeper  activities 
of  consciousness.  The  question  must  then  inevitably  arise 
whether  this  type  of  agency,  which  seems  to  be  so  funda- 
mental to  the  conscious  individual,  may  not  have  a  signifi- 
cance also  for  the  world.  This  suggestion  is  further 
strengthened  by  the  reflection  that  mechanical  agency  is 
not  finally  explanatory.     It  does  not  give  the  meaning  of 


172  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

anything  for  the  system  to  which  it  belongs,  whereas  in  the 
teleological  type  we  have  an  explanation  adapted  to  express 
meaning.  Stimulated  by  this  consideration,  which  also  has 
significance  for  the  formalist,  the  dynamic  physicist  recog- 
nizes the  reality  and  importance  of  the  issue.  It  is,  how- 
ever, plainly  ultra-physical,  and  must  be  taken  up  by  an 
investigation  whose  methods  and  limits  will  be  determined 
by  other  concepts  than  those  of  physics. 

We  are  thus  led  to  a  second  problem,  that  of  the  form 
in  which  the  metaphysical  investigation  so  plainly  de- 
manded shall  arise.  Physical  science  in  both  its  forms 
involves,  as  we  have  seen,  the  implication  of  a  real  world 
whose  nature  is  hidden  from  view.  The  formalist  finds 
himself  farther  away  from  this  nature  than  does  the  dyna- 
mist,  but  he  recognizes  it  and  the  same  ultra-physical  issues 
face  both  him  and  the  dynamist.  The  suggestion  of  a 
different  type  of  agency  in  the  world  from  the  mechanical, 
to  which  physics  is  committed,  arises  in  view  of  a  kind  of 
activity  of  which  every  conscious  being  is  aware.  But  the 
physical  investigator  does  not  find  himself  in  possession 
of  a  set  of  conceptions  which  enable  him  to  deal  with  such 
a  problem.  He  must,  therefore,  give  up  its  solution.  But 
how  should  metaphysics  be  in  any  better  case  ?  The  claims 
of  metaphysics  are  very  widely  challenged  and  mainly  on 
the  ground  that  its  terms  are  not  real,  but  pseudo-con- 
ceptions. But  that  its  conceptions  are  real,  and  not  pseudo, 
will  have  the  presumption  in  its  favor  if  we  consider  the 
source  of  their  origin.  We  have  seen  that  physics  recog- 
nizes a  form  of  agency  in  consciousness  different  from 
its  own.  This  form  is  found,  on  investigation,  to  be 
central  in  consciousness  and  to  be  related  to  a  field  of 
objective  phenomena  in  a  way  that  has  essential  analogies 
with  the  mode  in  which  phenomena  are  conceived  to  be 
connected  with  their  grounds  in  the  physical  world.  Thus  in 
the  physical  world  the  phenomenon  is  referred  as  an  effect 
to  the  activity  of  a  hidden  cause  which  is  necessary  to 
account  for  its  existence.     In  like  manner,  when  in  pursuit 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  173 

of  the  idea  of  an  instrument  to  be  used  in  some  investiga- 
tion the  physicist  puts  forth  certain  conscious  activities  the 
result  of  which  is  the  appearance  among  phenomena  of  a 
new  tool,  he  is  conscious  of  having  performed  a  function 
analogous  to  that  which  he  locates  in  the  heart  of  his  world. 
But  he  is  also  conscious  of  a  great  difference.  From  the 
physical  situation  he  must  eliminate  the  idea  which  stimu- 
lated his  activities  and  supplied  them  the  model  toward 
which  they  were  to  work.  He  must  also  eliminate  all 
elements  of  conscious  selection,  guidance  or  purpose.  The 
operation  of  his  agent  must  be  idea-less,  blind  and  fatalistic, 
making  straight  and  unerringly  for  a  goal  that  is  not  in 
any  sense  its  aim.  A  comparison  of  these  two  types  of 
agency  will  inevitably  suggest  the  world-problem,  the 
genesis  of  which  we  have  traced  above.  And  in  addition 
it  will  also  supply  the  norms  of  those  conceptions  which 
physics  lacks  but  which  metaphysics  needs,  in  order  to 
enter  on  an  intelligent  investigation  of  that  problem. 

What,  then,  are  the  conceptions  which  have  their  spring 
in  the  revelations  of  conscious  agency  and  supply  the 
instrument  of  metaphysical  investigation?  In  the  first 
place  the  ground-discovery  here  is  the  fact  that  the  central 
agency  of  consciousness  takes  on  the  form  of  selfhood  and 
thus  becomes  vitally  related  to  self-consciousness.  What 
we  learn  is  that  conscious  agency  is  self-agency  and  we  find 
the  self-agent  relating  itself  in  the  idea,  which  is  simply 
a  conceived  intuition  of  a  creation  not  yet  in  existence,  to 
the  purposive  activity  which  results  in  its  fulfillment,  that 
is,  in  its  taking  its  place  in  a  system  of  reality.  Or,  if  we 
take  a  step  that  is  perhaps  necessary  and  close  up  the  gap 
between  the  self  and  the  idea,  so  that  the  self  becomes  iden- 
tical with  the  present  consciousness  qualified  by  the 
idea,  we  shall  have  a  situation  describable  as  follows. 
Our  consciousness,  having  conceived  the  terms  of  some 
new  creation  which  is  yet  lacking  in  objective  existence, 
moves  on  toward  it  in  the  volitional  activity  that  is  in- 
volved in  its  selection  and  realization.     Here  is  a  form  of 


174  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

agency,  then,  which  contains  in  germ  all  of  the  most  char- 
acteristic concepts  of  metaphysics.  In  the  first  place  we 
have  the  notion  of  the  self  as  the  form  of  conscious  agency, 
while  in  connection  with  it  there  arise  a  number  of  con- 
cepts of  form.  The  self  qualified  by  the  ideal  creation 
supplies  the  type  of  self-activity  as  distinguished  from 
activity  that  is  mechanically  determined.  The  volitional 
outgo  supplies  the  type  of  selection  and  purpose  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  fatalism  of  physical  agency,  while  the 
process  of  realization  gives  the  type  of  finality,  that  is,  of 
the  end  conceived  in  such  a  way  as  to  become  the  guide  of 
the  processes  of  its  own  instatement.  When  the  physicist 
thus  discovers  a  type  of  agency  so  different  in  its  form 
and  method  of  attaining  results  from  the  agency  he  deals 
with  in  the  physical  world,  and  realizes  that  the  concepts 
he  is  working  under  leave  no  place  in  his  world  for  the 
introduction  of  this  new  type,  it  will  naturally  occur  to 
him  to  question  whether  his  physical  conceptions  are  to  be 
taken  as  completely  exhaustive  of  the  nature  of  reality. 
And  this  question  will  derive  additional  force  from  the 
fact  which  will  not  long  escape  his  attention,  namely,  that 
the  excluded  agency  is  precisely  the  most  central  and 
fundamental  form  of  consciousness;  that  it  supplies  the 
underlying  motives  of  cognition,  and  includes  practically 
all  the  movements  of  his  own  life-activity. 

It  is  clear,  then,  that  the  type  of  agency  on  which  meta- 
physics founds  its  explanation  of  the  world  is  not  fanciful 
or  foreign  to  experience,  but  that  it  is  the  very  type  exem- 
plified by  conscious  experience  itself.  The  claim  of  meta- 
physics is,  in  truth,  that  consciousness  shall  be  permitted 
to  identify  the  fundamental  agency  in  the  world  with  that 
which  is  most  fundamental  in  itself.  The  world  of  meta- 
physics is  thus  the  world  of  consciousness. 

Now,  we  shall  close  this  chapter  with  the  consideration 
of  three  topics,  (1)  the  necessity,  (2)  the  modus,  and  (3) 
the  limit  of  metaphysical  interpretation  in  the  sphere  o£ 
physics.     The  necessity  for  the  metaphysical  investigation 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  175 

arises  directly  out  of  the  nature  of  the  physical  conceptions 
themselves.  These,  as  we  have  seen,  are  of  such  a  charac- 
ter that  they  can  recognize  no  other  mode  of  activity  in  the 
world  than  the  mechanical.  To  physics  natural  causation 
must  be  absolutely  universal.  If  there  be  forms  of  agency 
which  will  not  fit  into  its  mold,  these  are  strictly  excluded. 
But  we  have  seen  not  only  that  other  forms  are  conceiv- 
able, but  that  they  are  also  actual.  Precisely  the  most 
fundamental  pulsation  of  the  physicist's  life  is  one  that 
beats  to  a  different  measure.  The  form  of  an  agency  that 
is  self-determining  through  the  idea  of  its  own  precon- 
ceived end,  is  a  present  intuition  in  every  man's  conscious- 
ness. What  is  the  relation  of  this  form  of  agency  to  the 
world  in  general;  and,  in  physics  especially,  what  is  its 
relation  to  the  physical  world  and  to  its  processes?  These 
questions  cannot  be  kept  down,  but  they  might  be  brushed 
aside  as  mere  idle  exhibitions  of  mental  worry  were  it  not 
for  the  fact  that  they  find  a  kind  of  aid  and  comfort  in  the 
very  camp  of  the  enemy.  The  concepts  of  physics  are  such 
as  to  exclude  certain  qualities  from  the  constitution  of  the 
world.  The  form  of  agency  in  physics  is  natural  causa- 
tion, but  this  is  supposed  to  act  mechanically  and  without 
intention  or  end-sight.  The  phenomena  of  the  world  are 
regarded  as  symbols  of  certain  substances  or  forces  which  do 
not  appear,  but  these  forces  which  are  the  world-agents  in 
producing  effects  are  supposed  to  lack  all  that  kind  of 
intelligence  which  a  man  possesses  when  he  knows  what  he 
is  about.  I  mean  the  intelligence  that  shapes  itself  into 
idea  and  purpose  and  thus  gives  significance  to  movements 
which  would  otherwise  be  meaningless.  What  physical  con- 
ceptions exclude  from  the  world  are  (1)  intelligence,  that 
synthesis  of  ideal  prevision  and  purpose  which  translates 
a  blind  force  into  a  conscious  self,  and  (2)  finality,  that 
selective  anticipation  of  a  thing  to  be  realized  which  trans- 
lates meaningless  movements  into  actions  that  are  signifi- 
cant, inasmuch  as  they  have  a  place  in  an  intelligent 
scheme.     In  view  of  this  the  question  of  primacy  is  inevita- 


176  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

ble.  Can  the  mechanical  conceptions  of  physics  be  taken 
as  completely  exhaustive  of  the  meaning  of  the  world,  or 
must  the  world  also  be  qualified  with  intelligence  and 
finality?  There  seems  to  be  only  one  rational  answer  to 
this  question.  We  cannot  be  satisfied  to  rest  in  a  theory  of 
the  world  that  excludes  intelligence  and  finality  from  its 
heart.  Because,  a  theory  of  things  which  claims  to  be  finally 
satisfactory  must  be  one  that  contains  an  intelligible  reason 
for  their  existence  in  the  system  to  which  they  belong. 
We  mean  by  an  intelligible  reason  one  that  will  not  leave 
them,  in  the  last  analysis,  to  mere  accident  or  blind  fate. 
Now  it  seems  so  clear  as  to  be  inevitable,  that  nothing  but 
intelligence  can  supply  such  a  reason.  For  while  it  may 
be  possible  as  a  proximate  reason  for  the  existence  of 
things  in  the  system  to  which  they  belong,  to  point  to  some 
fixity  of  nature  which  makes  it  certain  the  forces  will  act 
just  in  this  uniform  way,  yet  this  in  the  end  only  shifts  the 
question  to  the  fixity  itself  about  which  the  same  difficulty 
arises.  And  this  might  go  on  ad  infinitum  without  reach- 
ing any  final  term.  The  difference  between  all  this  and  a 
reason  which  will  be  satisfactory  is  a  difference  of  quality. 
It  is  not  a  reason  which  will  forestall  the  possibility  of 
further  questioning,  but  one  rather,  able  to  give  an  intel- 
ligible account  of  existence.  If  my  existence  here  and  now 
is  to  be  rendered  intelligible  it  will  not  be  sufficient  to 
regard  me  as  something  that  has  been  thrown  up  by  the 
action  of  blindly  working  and  fatalistic  agencies,  for  then 
I  have  no  significance  in  the  world  and  I  might  have  been 
altogether  missed  and  something  wholly  different  might 
have  been  thrown  up  instead,  without  any  meaning  having 
beeu  thereby  thwarted  or  turned  aside.  I  would  in  that 
case  belong  to  a  world  in  which  accident  is  supreme  and 
anything  might  be  the  cause  of  anything.  And  what  is 
true  of  me  would  be  true  of  other  things.  The  physicist 
could  not  meet  the  issue,  for  he  would  find  himself  in  a 
world  where  he  could  not  help  me  or  himself.  Nothing 
will  be  of  any  avail  except  a  remedy  that  goes  to  the  root 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  177 

of  the  disease  and  tells  me  that  I  can  only  have  an  intel- 
ligible reason  for  existence  provided  I  am  part  of  the 
meaning  of  the  world,  so  that  something  would  have  been 
thwarted  or  would  have  failed  of  realization  in  case  of 
my  non-existence.  And  this  can  have  no  other  interpreta- 
tion than  that  the  primary  ground  in  which  my  existence 
stands  determined  is  one  of  intelligent  prevision.  I  am 
part  of  the  realized  world,  primarily  because  I  have  a  place 
in  the  idea  in  which  the  world  is  conceived  and  in  the 
purpose  or  intention  through  which  it  is  fulfilled. 

The  necessity  for  the  metaphysical  explanation  arises, 
therefore,  out  of  the  demand  for  an  intelligible  reason  for 
the  existence  of  things  and  the  inability  of  the  physical 
explanation  to  give  such  a  reason.  We  come,  then,  to  the 
second  question,  which  is  one  chiefly  of  method.  If  the 
need  of  metaphysics  in  connection  with  the  world  of  phys- 
ical science  be  admitted  how  is  its  synthesis  with  the 
physical  to  be  brought  about?  The  easiest  solution  would 
be  one  that  would  regard  the  physical  and  the  metaphysical 
as  two  worlds  apart,  so  that  over  against  the  world  of 
conscious  agency  with  its  ideal  purposes  and  fulfillments 
would  stand  the  physical  world  with  its  non-intelligent 
forces  and  mechanically  determined  results.  Now  while 
it  is  no  doubt  true  that  such  a  dualism  would  truly  repre- 
sent a  great  deal  of  the  thinking  of  the  time,  yet  it  may 
fairly  be  said  that  reflection  will  always  find  it  unsatis- 
factory. It  cuts  the  sphere  in  which  man  lives,  that  of  his 
conscious  agency,  too  completely  off  from  the  physical 
world,  the  sphere  of  his  objective  activity.  In  short,  it 
leaves  him  with  two  worlds  instead  of  one,  without  any  con- 
ceivable points  of  connection  and  each  bristling  with  prob- 
lems incapable  of  solution.  The  great  objection  to  the 
dualistic  solution,  apart  from  its  irrationality,  is  the  fact 
that  it  is  no  solution  at  all  of  the  question  it  set  out  to 
answer.  What  it  set  out  to  answer  was  a  question  of  fact, 
How  is  the  physical  world  so  related  to  the  metaphysical, 
that  the  metaphysical  becomes  necessary  in  order  to  reach 

12 


178  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

a  theory  of  things  that  shall  be  finally  satisfactory  ?  Dual- 
ism answers  the  question  by  claiming  that  there  is  no  con- 
nection between  the  two  worlds.  How,  then,  can  one  be 
necessary  to  the  other  ?  We  must  seek  an  answer  that  will 
be  consistent  with  our  question  which  is  simply  one  of  the 
mode  in  which  a  synthesis  that  is  recognized  as  necessary 
shall  be  effected.  Another  alternative  here  is  to  regard 
the  world  of  physical  agency  as  mere  appearance  lacking  in 
substantial  reality.  This  is  precisely  the  way  in  which 
some  philosophers  ask  the  physicist  to  look  at  his  world. 
But  a  little  reflection  will  show  that  this  term,  appearance, 
has  no  special  significance  until  one  has  been  assigned  to 
it.  By  appearance  its  advocates  may  mean  illusion  and  in 
that  case  the  physicist  would  be  asked  to  believe  that  his 
world  is  an  illusion.  He  may  safely  be  depended  on  to 
refuse  to  do  anything  of  the  kind.  Again,  by  appearance 
its  advocates  may  mean  simply  phenomenal.  What  he 
asks  the  physicist  to  believe,  then,  is  that  his  world  is  purely 
phenomenal  and  the  physicist  will  be  able  to  give  this  his 
conditional  assent.  He  will  say  that  he  regards  the  terms 
he  deals  with  as  symbols  of  underlying  forces  which  do  not 
appear,  but  that  his  world  is  not  phenomenal  through  and 
through.  It  is  a  world  of  mechanically  acting  agents  of 
which  phenomena  are  conceived  to  be  the  effects.  These 
agents  are  substantial  existents  although  they  do  not 
appear  among  the  order  of  phenomena.  The  physicist 
cannot  allow  the  metaphysician  a  monopoly  of  the  unphe- 
nomenal  while  satisfying  himself  with  pure  phenomena. 
Finally,  the  term,  appearance,  may  simply  carry  with  it 
the  negative  implication  of  the  denial  of  real  existence. 
What  its  advocate  would  mean  to  assert  when  he  applied 
his  term  to  the  physical  world  is  that  the  unphenomenal 
concepts  of  physics  stand  for  mere  conventions  and  repre- 
sent nothing  real.  Metaphysically,  they  can  be  proved  to 
be  mere  illusions.  And  the  conclusion  may  be  either  that 
these  concepts  have  no  significance  for  reality ;  or,  that  they 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  179 

are  symbols  of  reality  which,  when  finally  construed,  be- 
come metaphysical  rather  than  physical. 

Now,  I  apprehend  that  while  the  physicist  would  be  dis- 
posed to  resent  a  theory  that  proposed  to  reduce  the  whole 
unphenomenal  part  of  his  science  to  a  species  of  bookkeep- 
ing, having  only  a  conventional  connection  with  reality, 
yet  to  the  second  alternative  indicated  above,  namely,  that 
his  concepts  are  only  provisional  and  partial,  not  final  and 
complete  determinations,  I  am  disposed  to  think  that 
nearly  every  intelligent  physicist  would  yield  his  assent. 
That  alternative  simply  involves  the  relativity  of  the  phys- 
ical conceptions  in  the  sense  that  they  are  not  exhaustive  or 
final.  It  may  be  admitted  that  they  do  not  profess  to 
characterize  the  things  with  which  they  deal  in  a  way  that 
will  exclude  all  other  concepts  of  a  different  order.  It  may 
also  be  admitted  that  these  concepts  may  be  only  symbols 
of  things  whose  true  nature  could  be  represented,  if  at  all, 
only  in  terms  of  a  different  order.  Both  of  these  admissions 
may  be  made  and  it  will  still  be  open  to  the  physicist  to 
deny  that  his  concepts  are  merely  of  the  bookkeeping  order 
or  that  he  is  dealing  with  mere  appearances.  It  is  still 
open  to  him  to  claim  that  the  aspect  of  the  world  which  he 
embodies  in  his  theory  of  matter  and  the  form  of  agency 
which  he  calls  mechanical,  are  real,  and  that  while  it  may 
be  true  that  these  represent  nothing  final  in  the  nature  of 
things,  they  do,  nevertheless,  represent  a  form  of  the 
world's  activity  that  is  stable  and  well-grounded.  And 
inasmuch  as  physics  in  common  with  natural  science  in 
general,  only  professes  to  deal  with  the  activities  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  inner  nature  of  things,  it  may  reason- 
ably claim  that  the  order  it  deals  with  is  a  real  mode  of 
the  activity  of  things  provided  it  be  stable  and  well- 
grounded. 

AVe  have  seen  that  physics  is  led  in  its  search  for  a 
stable  ground  of  phenomena  to  connect  them  as  symbols 
with  a  system  of  underlying  substances  or  forces  which 
stand  as  the  real  causal  agents  in  the  physical  world.     And 


180  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

it  is  led,  in  its  effort  to  define  the  mode  of  physical  action, 
to  formulate  its  principle  of  natural  causation  as  embody- 
ing the  form  of  agency  which  prevails  throughout  the  whole 
field  of  physical  activity.  Now  if  we  bear  in  mind  that 
physics,  in  laying  down  these  propositions,  is  not  attempt- 
ing to  define  inner  nature  but  rather  the  activity  of  things, 
and  that  its  point  of  view  is  that  of  the  observer  and 
describer  of  this  activity,  we  may  fairly  construe  its  pro- 
cedure here  in  the  following  terms.  From  the  standpoint 
of  the  physical  investigator  the  world  presents  itself  as  a 
group  of  phenomenal  activities  which  he  is  led  to  regard 
as  symbols  and  to  refer  to  the  operation  of  substances  or 
forces  that  underlie  them  and  are  stable  and  persistent  in 
their  nature.  He  is  also  led,  in  order  to  secure  a  rational 
connection  of  the  symbols  of  his  world  with  the  under- 
lying forces,  to  formulate  the  principle  of  natural  causa- 
tion as  the  form  of  agency  through  which  the  phenomena 
of  the  world  are  produced.  In  all  this  he  is  dealing  .hypo- 
thetically  with  terms  which  never  appear  to  Jbrim.  Only  the 
phenomena  appear,  and  these  are  taken  to  represent, 
symbolically,  deeper  realities  which  do  not  appear.  These 
are  asserted  as  hypothetical  necessities,  that  is,  as  condi- 
tions which  must  be  postulated  as  real,  provided  the  results 
of  scientific  observation  are  to  be  rationally  grounded. 
The  most  abject  devotee  of  matter  never  saw  matter  in  his 
life,  nor  has  he  ever  come  within  several  inferential  steps 
of  its  apprehension.  Matter  is  a  hypothetical  necessity 
without  wThieh  science  cannot  get  on.  Again,  the  form  of 
agency  that  is  embodied  in  the  principle  of  natural  causa- 
tion is  simply  another  hypothetical  necessity  of  physical 
science.  Its  most  abject  devotee  never  saw  physical  causa- 
tion or  experienced  the  kind  of  agency  which  it  asserts. 
He  can  only  approach  within  several  inferential  steps  of  its 
presence-chamber.  The  physicist  infers  physical  cause 
from  the  activities  of  his  symbols  which  seem  to  fit  into  a 
calculus  that  excludes  prevision  and  finality,  better  than 
into  one  that  includes  these.     Because  the  introduction  of 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  181 

these  terms  of  finality  would  confuse  the  problems  of 
physics  and  render  them  too  difficult  for  solution  they  are 
ruled  out  and  the  mechanical  conception  is  reached  by  a 
method  of  elimination. 

This,  however,  does  not  reduce  his  concepts  to  the  arti- 
ficial form  of  mere  methodic  expedients.  They  are  es- 
sential features  of  the  gnosis  of  science,  determining  its 
fundamental  view  of  the  world  and  proving  themselves 
essential  to  the  rationality  and  the  progress  of  scientific 
knowledge.  The  scientist  is  committed  to  their  defense, 
then,  either  as  defining  some  real  aspect  of  things,  or  as 
symbolizing  it.  Nevertheless,  when  he  essays  to  defend 
the  reality  of  his  conceptions  he  finds  that  he  has  under- 
taken no  easy  task.  Do  you  mean  that  if  we  could  pene- 
trate the  constitution  of  things  deeply  enough  we  should 
come  upon  reals  corresponding  to  the  physical  atoms  or 
forces  which  you  hypothetically  posit?  Again,  Do  you 
mean  to  assert  that  the  form  of  mechanical  agency  which 
you  have  embodied  in  your  principle  of  natural  causation 
is  anywhere  to  be  found  in  the  world  ?  If  so,  then  it  must 
be  possible  to  find  instances  where  the  interval  between  the 
cause  and  its  effect  can  be  traversed  and  nature,  as  it  were, 
caught  in  the  act  of  producing  a  result  mechanically.  The 
only  hope  of  the  physicist  in  this  field  lies  in  a  different 
direction.  He  will  never  be  able  to  reduce  his  hypotheticals 
to  the  terms  of  reality  they  are  meant  to  be,  and  which, 
it  must  be  admitted,  the  interest  of  science  demands  that 
they  shall  be,  until  he  begins  to  see  the  need  of  connecting 
the  world  of  mechanical  agencies  with  a  more  ultimate  and 
final  world  of  prevision  and  intention.  We  have  seen  that 
in  the  metaphysical  world  that  alone  can  claim  reality 
which  has  meaning.  If  I  can  establish  myself  in  the  inten- 
tion and  purpose  of  the  world,  I  am  real,  for  then  I  have 
significance.  This  does  not  mean  simply  that  I  have  sig- 
nificance for  myself,  but  that  I  am  an  embodiment  of  an 
intention  and  purpose  which  is  objective  to  me  and  in- 
cludes  me   as   a   necessary   part   of   a  system   of   things. 


182  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

The  physicist  will  be  led  to  a  position  from  which  he  can 
justify  his  own  doctrine  of  the  world  if  he  first  becomes 
sufficiently  oriented  to  recognize  the  connection  of  his  own 
creed  with  the  metaphysical  doctrine  of  the  world.  His 
very  exclusion  of  prevision  and  finality  arises  from  his 
initial  determination  to  know  nothing  of  the  inner  nature 
of  things.  This  position  he  has  been  forced  to  modify  in 
his  concepts  of  hypothetical  necessity.  But  he  has  been 
able  to  hold  to  these  without  violating  the  spirit  of  his 
mechanical  method.  It  is  only  when  he  is  asked  a  really 
metaphysical  question  that  he  is  in  appearance  driven  out- 
side his  defenses,  but  it  is  my  object  here  to  show  that  his 
own  welfare  is  involved  in  the  answer  to  this  question. 
We  have  seen  that  the  whole  physical  doctrine  of  the  world 
is  developed  from  one  point  of  view,  that  of  the  external 
observer  who  professes  to  characterize  the  world  simply 
in  terms  of  its  movements.  But  these  movements  are  sym- 
bols and  taken  abstractly  have  no  significance.  They  pre- 
sent simply  the  outer  shell  of  a  system  that  is  inwardly 
empty.  To  escape  this  irrationality,  physics  connects  its 
symbols,  as  effects,  with  certain  underlying  causes  or 
grounds.  And  this  postulate  of  a  reality  which  the  phe- 
nomenon symbolizes  is  necessary  in  order  to  redeem  the 
world  of  physics  from  irrationality.  But  when  asked  to 
give  a  reason  why  this  postulate  should  not  be  regarded  as 
a  mere  conventional  cover  of  emptiness,  the  physicist  can 
find  no  easy  answer.  He  has  never  anywhere  come  upon 
the  form  of  agency  which  he  postulates,  and  the  terms 
matter  and  force  are  simply  names  which  represent  nothing 
that  is  conceivable.  The  whole  machinery  of  postulation 
seems  to  have  been  built  up  in  vacuo  and  may  be  blown 
down  with  a  breath.  Now  the  touch  which  transforms  his 
whole  world  into  a  system  of  reality  rather  than  one  of  mere 
empty  symbolism  is  found  when  the  physicist  recognizes 
the  fact  that  his  only  real  experience  of  agency  anywhere  is 
to  be  found  in  his  own  conscious  activity.  This  is  the  point 
of  immediacy  that  translates  his  world  into  concreteness. 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  183 

The  starting-point,  as  well  as  the  norms  of  reality,  is  to  be 
found  nowhere  else  than  in  conscious  experience.  But 
having  found  both  here  the  physicist,  by  a  process  of 
which  he  is  doubtless  more  than  half  unconscious,  translates 
them  into  universals  and  thus  arrives  at  the  notion  of  a 
world  of  agencies  of  which  the  phenomena  of  the  world  are 
symbols.  From  this  notion  of  agencies  in  the  world 
analogous  to  that  which  operates  in  consciousness,  the  no- 
tion of  mechanical  agency  is  arrived  at  by  a  process  of 
elimination.  The  physicist  can  show  that  the  result  is  a 
deduction  from  the  behavior  of  the  phenomena  with  which 
he  deals.  For  it  can  readily  be  shown  that  the  laws  of  the 
movements  we  call  physical  yield  to  mechanical  treatment, 
whereas  they  prove  recalcitrant  when  approached  from  any 
other  point  of  view.  The  strong  defense  of  physics,  after 
all,  is  found  in  the  fact  that  its  method  works  and  that  its 
world  of  phenomena  behaves  in  general  in  a  way  consistent 
with  mechanical  presuppositions.  The  mechanical  pre- 
suppositions thus  stand  justified.  They  do  embody  the 
notion  of  a  form  of  agency  that  is  borne  out  by  the  conduct 
of  the  world  as  it  reveals  itself  in  space  and  time.  But 
these  conceptions,  after  all,  represent  only  hypothetical 
demands  and  not  anything  which  can  be  affirmed  as  real. 
The  only  thing  that  really  exists  to  the  physicist  is  the 
phenomenon.  All  the  rest  is  postulated  in  view  of  the  fact 
that  otherwise  the  phenomenal  world  would  be  irrational. 
Science  cannot  breathe  the  atmosphere  of  irrationality, 
and  hence  the  desperation  with  which  it  holds  on  to  the 
deeper  realities  of  the  world.  But  when  it  would  reach 
some  intelligible  concept  of  these  deeper  realities,  or  even 
when  it  would  satisfy  itself  that  they  are  reals  at  all  and 
not  empty  illusion,  the  only  source  from  which  it  can 
derive  help  is  consciousness.  In  consciousness  and  the 
form  of  agencies  which  it  reveals,  science  finds  its  own 
deeper  faith  in  an  agency  that  underlies  phenomena,  con- 
firmed. And  having  reached  this  insight  it  soons  becomes 
apparent  that  its  own  mechanical  conceptions  have  been 


184  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

derived  from  norms  supplied  by  consciousness,  by  means 
of  a  process  of  abstraction. 

The  justification  of  the  synthesis  of  the  concepts  of 
physics  and  metaphysics  in  the  interpretation  of  the  world 
of  pure  physical  activity  arises  mainly  in  view  of  three  con- 
siderations: Firstly,  the  metaphysical  appeal  to  conscious- 
ness and  its  norms  is  necessary,  in  the  last  resort,  in  order 
to  redeem  the  physical  world  from  illusion  and  to  ground  it 
as  a  real  aspect  of  a  system  of  reality.  We  have  seen  that 
apart  from  this  appeal,  the  whole  mechanical  framework  of 
science  loses  its  connection  with  the  world  of  existence. 
But  the  synthesis  is  necessary,  secondly,  in  order  to  meet 
the  refinements  of  a  complete  theory  of  the  world.  Phys- 
ics arises  as  a  first  interpretation  of  the  phenomenal  world, 
and  its  limits  are  determined  by  certain  mechanical  con- 
ceptions which  have  their  justification,  as  we  saw,  in  the 
character  of  phenomena  as  they  manifest  themselves  in 
space  and  time.  But  we  have  seen  that  the  physical  inter- 
pretation, though  valid  and  necessary  as  a  first  construc- 
tion, does  not  meet  the  requirements  of  a  final  theory  of 
things.  A  final  theory  is  one  that  transcends  mechanism 
and  finds  the  original  spring  of  things  in  intelligence  and 
purpose.  Mechanism  itself  is  reached  only  by  abstraction 
from  intelligent  and  purposive  agency,  and  the  final  theory 
of  things  will  be  arrived  at  only  by  a  reversal  of  this 
abstracting  process  and  by  a  return  to  the  notion  of  the 
concrete. 

The  synthesis  is  justified,  lastly,  by  the  fact  that  it  is 
necessary  to  a  rational  conception  of  the  limits  of  physics 
and  metaphysics.  The  physicist  will  feel  enjoined  from 
the  denial  of  metaphysics  by  the  insight  that  his  own 
mechanical. conceptions  are  abstractions  from  the  concrete 
norms  with  which  metaphysics  deals  and  that  it  has 
derived  from  these  norms  the  very  qualities  which  fit  them 
for  final  interpretation.  On  the  other  hand  the  meta- 
physician will  feel  enjoined  from  denying  the  reality  of 
the  physicist's  world  by  the  insight  that  the  mechanical 


chap.  ii.  PHYSICAL  ACTIVITIES.  185 

concepts  of  physics,  while  lacking  a  basis  in  concrete 
experience,  are  nevertheless  rendered  necessary  by  the  char- 
acter of  physical  movements  in  space  and  time.  Meta- 
physically, it  may  be  denied  that  the  space  and  time  world 
is  anything  more  than  a  mere  symbol  of  a  deeper  reality: 
so  be  it ;  yet  it  cannot  be  denied  that  this  symbolism  is  an 
abiding  aspect  of  reality;  that  it  is  what  Leibnitz  calls  a 
well-grounded  phenomenon,  and  that  it  is,  therefore,  a 
bona  fide  part  of  a  system  of  reality.  On  that  account  it 
must  be  respected  and  the  validity  of  the  physical  interpre- 
tation will  be  unassailable  within  the  limits  of  physical 
conceptions.  It  is  in  these  conceptions  that  the  actual 
limits  are  to  be  found.  We  have  only  to  ask  the  question : 
When  the  requirements  of  physics  have  been  met  and  satis- 
fied are  there  any  ultra-physical  problems  which  arise  and 
require  a  different  type  of  explanation?  This  question  may 
be  very  briefly  answered.  The  problem  of  the  relation  of 
the  physical  mechanism  to  the  real  world  is  itself  ultra- 
physical  and  can  be  answered  only  from  metaphysical 
data.  Again,  if  we  critically  analyze  the  mechanical  con- 
ceptions, we  shall  find  that  in  excluding  intelligence  and 
purpose  they  have  excluded  both  initiative  and  finality. 
Initiative  is  excluded  by  the  form  of  mechanical  agency 
conceived  as  cause,  for  here  all  activity  is  represented  as 
conditional  and  determined  by  activity  external  to  itself. 
There  is  no  initiative  in  a  mechanical  system,  and  this 
must  be  supplied  either  by  Aristotle 's  postulate  of  the  self- 
acting  or  by  some  equivalent.  But  the  very  concept  of 
self-initiative  is  ultra-physical  and  can  be  conceived  only 
by  the  use  of  the  analogies  of  intelligence.  Finality  means 
simple  a  result  or  effect  that  is  intended,  and  which  there- 
fore directs  the  energy  of  its  own  realization.  But  the  me- 
chanical notion  of  effect  makes  it  the  product  of  activity 
without  intention.  In  the  last  analysis,  however,  a  design- 
less effect  falls  into  the  limbo  of  accident  or  blind  fate,  and 
in  order  to  rescue  it  from  irrationality  it  must  be  related  to 
some  purpose  in  which  it  is  intended.     The  problem   of 


186  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

finality  is  thus  ultra-physical  and  can  be  dealt  with  only  in 
the  light  of  data  that  are  metaphysical.  It  is  clear, 
moreover,  that  no  theory  of  things  can  be  considered  com- 
plete if  it  does  not  supply  a  method  of  dealing  with  the 
ultra-physical  problems  which  arise  inevitably  out  of  the 
physical  investigation. 


CHAPTER  III 


OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS. 


The  rise  of  the  living  organism  marks  the  appearance  of 
a  species  of  dualism  in  the  world.  Life  in  its  relation  to 
the  physical  activities  that  snrronnd  it  seems  to  constitute 
an  imperium  in  imperio  in  which  the  laws  of  the  larger 
realm  are  set  aside.  The  organism  seems  to  be  a  self- 
centered  individual  whose  movements  have  a  definite  aim, 
the  conservation  and  development  of  the  individual  itself. 
To  the  sum  of  these  end-seeking  activities  the  term  living 
is  applied.  An  organism  is  a  center  of  living  movements. 
The  whole  secret  of  the  organic  world  seems  to  be  locked 
up  in  the  meaning  of  the  term  life.  The  consideration  of 
the  life-movement  will,  therefore,  constitute  the  central 
problem  of  our  inquiry.  Now,  in  approaching  the  organic 
world  from  the  standpoint  of  the  physical,  the  first  question 
that  arises  is  whether  the  analogies  of  the  physical  apply 
to  the  organic,  and  if  so,  in  what  way.  The  presumption 
of  science  is,  of  course,  against  any  decided  breach  of  con- 
tinuity and  in  favor  of  the  expectation,  at  least,  that  even 
so  decided  an  innovation  as  the  introduction  into  the 
physical  medium  of  a  life-movement  will  involve  modifica- 
tion and  transformation  rather  than  a  complete  solution 
of  continuity. 

All  physical  phenomena  were  found  to  be  reducible  to 
matter  and  notion,  and  in  biology  the  phenomena  of  life 
are  reducible,  in  the  last  analysis,  to  corresponding  terms. 

187 


188  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

Organic  matter  is  called  protoplasm  or  bioplasm  and  is 
composed  of  living  cells  which  constitute  the  vital  units  in 
the  world  of  life.  These  vital  units  are  endowed  with 
plasticity  which  involves  a  high  degree  of  susceptibility  to 
both  modification  and  differentiation  of  structure  (as 
Huxley  points  out  in  his  article  on  Biology  in  the  Ninth 
Edition  of  the  Encyclopedia  Britannica)  as  well  as  to  the 
opposite  process  of  integration  on  which  Mr.  Spencer  puts 
emphasis  in  his  Principles  of  Biology.  Now,  the  term 
matter  in  physics  is  one  that  excludes  the  notion  of  internal 
or  qualitative  change.  To  endow  physical  matter  with 
plasticity  would  unfit  it  for  its  function.  The  units  of 
matter  in  the  physical  world,  whatever  these  units  are 
conceived  to  be,  must  be  presumed  always  to  continue  quan- 
titatively the  same.  But  the  unit  of  matter  in  biology  must 
be  susceptible  to  just  this  quantitative  change.  It  is  a  modi- 
fiable term  in  which  qualitative  changes  are  constantly 
taking  place,  and  it  is  this  susceptibility  to  incessant  trans- 
formation which  fits  it  for  its  biological  duty. 

If  we  turn  to  the  other  biological  element,  motion,  we 
discover  a  difference  equally  as  great.  It  was  found  to  be  a 
characteristic  of  physical  motion  that  it  excludes  the  ideas 
of  selection  and  end-seeking.  The  direction  of  physical 
motion  can  be  calculated  as  a  result  of  the  composition 
of  the  forces  which  enter  into  its  production.  The 
cause  which  produces  it  acts  not  only  a  tergo,  but  also  ex- 
ternally, so  that  in  a  sense  it  may  be  said  to  be  fatalistically 
determined.  The  life-movements  differ  from  these  in  tak- 
ing the  form  at  least  of  selectiveness  and  end-seeking.  I 
say  the  form,  for  real  selection  and  end-seeking  are  possible 
only  where  there  is  conscious  foresight.  But  here  we  are 
dealing  with  life  apart,  as  yet,  from  the  presupposition  of 
consciousness.  The  life-movement  is  selective  in  a  sense 
that  involves  the  plasticity  of  the  life-substances,  and  this 
plasticity  is  not  a  mere  passive  susceptibility  of  that  which 
is  in  itself  quantitatively  indifferent  to  change.  The 
selectiveness,  if  it  is  not  reducible  to  a  purely  physical 


chap.  in.  OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  189 

effect  of  composition,  must  be  rooted  in  some  original 
qualitative  character  of  the  tissue  of  which  it  is  a  function. 
In  other  words,  the  plasticity  of  the  vital  units  will  involve 
something  more  than  mere  passive  responsiveness  to  forces 
which  play  upon  them  from  the  outside.  It  will  involve, 
in  addition  to  this,  the  possession  of  some  original  char- 
acter of  its  own  which  counts  for  somewhat  in  the  whole 
life-manifestation. 

We  are  here  simply  pointing  to  a  necessary  implication 
of  the  selectiveness  of  the  life-movement,  without  attempt- 
ing any  explanation  of  it.  The  situation  represents  a  kind 
of  dilemma.  Either  the  selectiveness  of  the  life-movement 
involves  something  more  than  the  mere  passive  suscepti- 
bility of  the  living-tissue  to  externally  induced  change ;  or, 
it  is  reducible  in  the  last  analysis  to  a  purely  physical  phe- 
nomenon, and  the  difference  between  life  and  inorganic 
motion  vanishes.  If,  however,  it  does  involve  something 
more  than  mere  passive  receptivity,  it  follows  that  the  life- 
units  must  be  endowed  with  some  active  constitution  of 
their  own  which  they  possess  by  virtue  of  their  living 
character.  Given  the  selectiveness  as  something  more  than 
passive  susceptibility  to  change,  what  we  call  the  end- 
seeking  quality  of  the  life-movement  will  have  a  ground 
in  the  original  active  character  of  the  living-tissue  itself. 
However  much  we  may  be  led  to  ascribe  to  the  operation 
of  external  forces,  the  outcome  in  the  life  of  the  organism, 
at  any  point  in  its  development,  will  not  be  wholly  explica- 
ble in  terms  of  these  forces.  Something  will  have  to  be 
allowed  for  what  we  may  call  the  germ  of  active  individual- 
ity in  the  organism  itself. 

Returning  now  to  the  problem  of  method,  the  question 
is,  to  what  extent  the  modification  of  the  terms  matter  and 
motion  which  has  been  found  to  be  necessary  in  order  to 
adapt  them  to  living  organisms,  will  carry  with  it  a  cor- 
responding change  in  the  methods  of  physical  science. 
We  have  seen  that  physical  effects  are  produced  by  forces 
acting  not  only  a  tergo,  but  also  externally,  by  way  of  com- 


190  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

position  or  impact.  But  vital  movements,  by  virtue  of 
their  selectiveness,  must  be  referred  to  substances  that  are 
plastic,  not  simply  in  the  passive  sense,  but  in  the  sense  of 
possessing  an  active  constitution  which  in  some  way  pre- 
determines the  form  of  the  life-activity.  The  norm  of 
selectiveness  is  thus  located,  so  far  as  it  is  not  reducible  to 
the  effect  of  external  causes,  in  the  living-tissue  itself  and 
represents  what  we  may  call  a  predetermined  trend.  In 
view  of  this  fact  it  will  be  possible  for  us  to  determine  the 
modification  of  the  method  of  physics  which  the  nature  of 
the  life-elements  will  render  necessary.  Biological,  in 
common  with  purely  physical,  effects  are  to  be  referred  to 
causes  which  act  a  tergo,  that  is,  in  the  rear  of  the  process ; 
but  the  biological  effects  are  not  produced  externally,  by 
qualitatively  indifferent  forces  which  act  in  a  purely  quan- 
titative way;  they  are  to  be  regarded,  on  the  contrary,  as 
results  of  the  internal  changes  which  are  taking  place 
in  the  constitution  of  the  living-tissue  itself.  Let  us 
try  to  state  the  same  fact  in  different  words.  The 
method  of  physics  depends  for  its  efficacy  on  the  assumed 
internal  rigidity  of  its  forces.  But  that  of  biology  involves 
the  plasticity  of  the  forces  with  which  it  deals.  Its 
most  fundamental  changes  are  transformations  in  the 
living-tissue.  But  allowing  for  this  difference  we  find 
that  the  antecedents  of  the  life-movements  are  to  be  looked 
for,  either  in  the  environment,  that  is,  among  externally 
acting  forces,  or  in  the  plastic  character  of  the  living-tissue 
itself.  In  these  sources  combined,  the  explanation  of  the 
selectiveness  of  the  life-movement  is  to  be  sought.  It 
does  not  seem,  then,  that  the  method  of  biology  can  dis- 
pense with  the  principle  of  natural  causation.  In  physics 
a  cause  is  an  agent  which  not  only  operates  behind  its  effect, 
but  produces  it  externally,  whereas  in  biology  the  cause  is 
still  to  be  sought  behind  its  effect,  but  it  does  not  produce  it 
externally.  Directly,  this  effect  is  the  result  of  the  internal 
plasticity  of  the  living  substance,  while  only  indirectly 
and  in  part,  it  is  referable  to  causes  that  are  external.     But 


chap.  in.  ORGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  191 

the  essence  of  natural  causation,  as  distinguished  from 
finality,  lies  in  its  mode  of  getting  effects  by  the  forward 
push  of  forces  which  lie  behind  the  effect  and  act  without 
foresight.  Biology,  so  far  as  it  is  a  natural  science,  com- 
mits itself  to  just  this  species  of  agency.  It  is  committed, 
then,  to  natural  causation  as  its  principle,  but  its  use  of 
the  principle  must  be  distinguished  from  the  use  made  of  it 
in  physics  in  view  of  the  fact  that  what  physics  aims  at  is  a 
purely  quantitative  use  of  the  notion  of  cause,  whereas 
biology,  on  the  contrary,  dealing  as  it  does  with  internal 
rather  than  external  changes,  aims  to  make  a  qualitative 
use  of  the  same  notion. 

We  may  state  the  notion  of  causation  which  is  funda- 
mental in  biology  as  that  of  the  dependence  of  the  phe- 
nomena of  life  on  antecedents  by  which  they  are,  in  the  last 
analysis,  qualitatively,  not  quantitatively,  determined.  By 
qualitative  determination  we  mean  the  immediate  depend- 
ence of  results  on  the  internal  changes  of  a  plastic  medium, 
whatever  may  be  our  conclusions  as  to  their  more  remote  and 
ultimate  causes.  But  the  whole  of  biological  method  is  not 
deducible  from  a  doctrine  of  elements  alone.  We  must 
pass  on  from  the  elements  to  the  processes  of  the  living 
world,  and  in  order  to  rightly  apprehend  these  we  must 
know  something  of  the  conditions  out  of  which  the  processes 
themselves  arise.  At  the  outset  a  fundamental  distinction 
has  to  be  made  between  the  organism  on  the  one  hand  and 
what  is  called  its  environment.  The  organism  is  simply 
that  synthesis  of  structure  and  function  in  which  the  life- 
movement  concretely  embodies  itself,  while  the  term  en- 
vironment is  a  compendious  name  for  all  the  forces  which 
act  externally  on  the  organism  and  in  any  way  affect  its 
development.  The  organism  carries  on  its  system  of 
activities  within  this  environment  and  these  take  the  form 
outwardly  of  responses  to  the  forces  of  the  environment, 
while  more  internally  represented,  they  are  movements  of 
adjustment  and  accommodation  by  means  of  which  the 
organism   exercises   its   selective   function   and  secures   its 


192  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

own  growth  and  development.  It  is  right  here,  in  view  of 
this  primary  situation,  that  a  line  of  fundamental  cleavage 
shows  itself  among  biologists.  What  is  the  essential  rela- 
tion of  the  organism  to  the  environment,  and  which  of  these 
terms  is  to  be  considered  most  real  ?  Shall  the  organism  be 
regarded  as  a  phenomenon  of  the  environment,  or  shall  it 
be  considered  something  in  itself  and  on  a  par  with  the 
forces  of  the  environment?  In  answer  to  these  questions 
some  biologists  adopt  the  first  alternative,  treating  the 
organism  as  a  mere  phenomenon  of  environing  forces. 
The  living-movement  is  simply  a  response  to  the  more 
primary  movements  of  the  non-living,  while  the  life-sub- 
stance itself,  though  endowed  with  plasticity,  is  regarded 
as  purely  passive.  The  whole  movement  has  its  initiative, 
therefore,  outside  of  the  organism  and  in  the  forces  of  the 
environment.  The  theory  that  would  make  the  organic  move- 
ment an  effect  of  causes  operating  in  the  environment  may 
be  called  the  mechanical  view  of  the  situation,  while  that 
which  finds  in  the  nature  of  the  organism  itself  one,  and 
that  perhaps  the  most  important,  condition  of  its  selective 
development  may  be  called  vitalistic.  Or,  bearing  in  mind 
that  the  question  here  is  where  the  primacy  is  to  be  located 
(in  the  environment  or  in  the  organism),  we  may  employ 
the  terms  phylogenic  and  ontogenic  to  designate  the  oppos- 
ing theories. 

We  have,  then,  among  biologists  two  opposing  views 
of  the  relation  of  organism  and  environment,  the  phylo- 
genic and  ontogenic,  which  serve  to  distinguish  the  more 
mechanical  biologists  from  those  who  favor  a  less  mechan- 
ical and  more  vitalistic  theory.  Let  us  then  go  on  to  the 
processes  by  which  the  life-movement  realizes  itself,  and, 
in  the  first  place,  let  us  attempt  a  broad  characterization 
of  this  movement  in  its  relation  to  space  and  time.  There 
are  problems  of  distribution  in  biology  in  connection  with 
which  the  category  of  space  becomes  of  primary  importance. 
But  we  are  only  very  remotely  concerned  with  the  forces 
of  distribution  here.     Our  interest  is  rather  in  the  prob- 


chap.  in.  OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  193 

lems  of  origin  and  development  as  connected  with  the 
central  movement  of  life.  The  vital  category  in  biology 
is  time  rather  than  space,  and  this  has  its  explanation  in 
the  fact  that  biology  deals  with  movements  which  arc  pri- 
marily qualitative  rather  than  quantitative  and  that  it 
is  led,  therefore,  to  substitute  time-dimensions  for  dimen- 
sions in  space.  The  constitutive  unit  in  determining  the 
nearness  or  remoteness  of  qualitative  terms  is  one  of  time 
rather  than  space.  What  I  mean  may  be  perhaps  more 
clearly  expressed  in  another  way.  Qualitative  changes 
that  are  not  regarded  as  external  to  the  substance  which 
they  affect,  but  rather  as  internal,  give  rise  primarily  to  a 
si  rii  s  which  has  no  space  equivalent  but  embodies  itself  in  a 
life-history.  If  the  substance  in  which  the  changes  take 
place  were  conscious,  these  would  constitute  its  experience. 
Abstracting  them  from  consciousness  they  constitute  a  life- 
movement,  a  history  of  the  life-substance  written  in  terms 
of  its  changing  conditions  in  the  time-series.  Now,  it  is 
evident  that  while  distinctions  in  space  do  not  carry  with 
them  any  change  in  the  character  of  the  matter  dis- 
tinguished; on  the  contrary,  a  distinction  in  the  time-series 
always  means  a  difference  of  character.  Let  us  take  the 
purely  quantitative  equation  a=5  and  let  us  suppose 
any  number  of  divisions  to  be  made  in  a  while  b  is  left 
unmodified;  the  equation  a=b  still  remains  true.  On 
the  other  hand  let  us  supppose  a  and  b  to  be  the  sub- 
jects of  qualitative  changes.  By  hypothesis  the  propo- 
sition a=b  is  now  true.  But  if  we  suppose  that  in  a=6 
each  stands  for  a  mass  of  protoplasm  and  that  a  series  of 
qualitative  distinctions  arise  in  a  so  that  it  becomes,  say 
a  jellyfish,  it  will  no  longer  be  true  that  a=6.  One  of 
our  terms  has  become  internally  complex;  its  character 
is  different  while  the  character  of  the  other  remains  the 
same.  It  is  then  no  longer  true  that  a=b.  What  the 
equation  a=b  stands  for  after  the  character  of  a  has  been 
modified  is  a  reversed  genetic  judgment.  But  as  Professor 
Baldwin  has  shown  in  his  "Genetic  Modes,"  a  converted 
13 


194  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

genetic  judgment  is  never  true,  and  the  reason  is  that  its 
copula  is  a  time-dimension  and  the  is  or  equals  must  be 
translated  into  becomes.  The  a  (jellyfish)  does  not  become 
b  (protoplasm),  but  if  we  apply  the  symbol  a  to  the  com- 
plexly charactered  living-substance  of  the  present,  then  we 
must  look  for  some  genetic  antecedent  b  in  the  anterior  part 
of  the  time-series  to  which  we  may  assign  the  role  of  sub- 
ject. Let  b  stand  for  protoplasm  and  a  for  some  present 
form  of  animal  existence,  say  a  soft-shell  crab:  the  propo- 
sition 6=a  will  then  have  true  genetic  character  and  will 
mean  protoplasm  becomes  soft-shell  crab.1 

Now,  it  is  impossible  to  convert  such  a  proposition  and 
make  it  in  any  sense  true.  Soft-shell  crab  does  not  in  any 
genetic  sense  become  what  is  simpler  than  itself.  We 
cannot  read  forward  from  b  to  a  by  any  logical  process; 
nor  can  we  read  back  from  a  to  b  logically,  for  the  con- 
nection is  one  of  becoming,  and  genesis  does  not  work 
backward.  All  this  has  been  shown  by  Professor  Baldwin 
in  what  may,  I  think,  be  called  a  first  effort  to  distinguish 
between  genetic  reasoning  and  the  reasoning  of  ordinary 
logic.  What  I  would  contend  for  in  this  connection  is  that 
the  principle  of  genetic  reasoning  is  perfectly  consistent 
with  what  I  have  called  qualitative  causation;  that  we  do 
not  in  fact  drop  the  principle  of  causation  in  genetic 
reasoning.  We  do  drop  the  quantitative  form  of  that 
principle,  which  does  not  exhaust  its  significance,  but  we 
adhere  to  the  principle  of  explanation  it  embodies,  and 
what  we  really  do  is  to  translate  the  principle  into  qualita- 
tive terms.  AVe  thus  reach  a  concept  of  causation  that  fits 
into  the  genetic  mold  and  renders  it  applicable  to  the 
movements  of  history. 

The  processes  by  which  the  life-movement  realizes  itself 
are  called  evolution  and  heredity.  Evolution  is  a  general 
name  for  genetic  progress,  while  the  term  heredity  repre- 
sents the  means  by  which  the  results  of  progress  are  con- 

1  See  Baldwin's  suggestive  discussion  of  genetic  modes  in  Develop- 
ment and  Evolutio?i,  1902. 


chap.  in.  ORGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  195 

served.     Biologists  make  a  distinction  under  the  general 
term  evolution  between  what  they  call  the  ontogenetic  and 
phylogenetic   processes,   the   former   applying  to  the  life- 
history  of  the  organism  itself  so  far  as  it  is  to  be  ascribed 
to  the   internal  forces  of  the  organism,  while  the  latter 
refers  to  the  more  external  function  of  the  environment. 
The  whole  causality  of  the  movement  is  thus  supposed  to 
be  distributed  between  the  more  external  and  mechanical, 
and  the  more  internal  and  vital,  forces.     Here,  again,  the 
line  of  fundamental  cleavage  shows  itself,  and  biologists 
divide  into  two  schools  accordingly  as  they  are  disposed  to 
give  the  primacy  in  evolution  to  the  ontogenetic  or  to  the 
phylogenetic  agencies.     The  exponents  of  the  phylogenetic 
tendency   favor,    on   the   whole,    a   more   mechanical   con- 
ception of  biology;  one  that  will  bring  it  and  its  methods 
into  as  close  conformity  to  that  of  physics  as  the  difference 
of  material  will  permit.     To  the  phylogenists  the  environ- 
ment is  the  primary  agent  of  the  whole  life-movement  and 
this  movement  is  treated  as  in  a  sense  its  epi-phenomenon. 
The  ontogenists,  on  the  other  hand,  are  disposed  not  only 
to  ascribe  more  reality  to  the  organism,  but  also  to  give  the 
organic    conditions   the   primacy   over   the    forces   of   the 
environment,  as  promoters  of  evolution.     If  now  we  turn 
to  the  conserving  factor,  heredity,  we  find  the  distinction 
between  the   two   tendencies   equally  marked.     The   most 
burning  issue  of  the  science  of  biology  in  the  generation 
just  passed  has  been  that  of  heredity.     If  we  take  the 
Lamarckian-Spencerian  doctrine  as  representing  one  tend- 
ency,   what    we    may    call    the    Darwinian-Weismannian 
doctrine   will   represent   its   opposite.     Distinguishing  La- 
marck's  doctrine   of   inheritance   from  his   theory   of  the 
factors  which   enter   into   evolution,   the   former  becomes 
practically   identical  with  the  view  that  has  been  most 
fully   developed  by   Herbert   Spencer,   to   the   effect  that 
heredity  is  a  direct  function  of  the  environment  and  that 
it  operates  by  the  transmission  of  acquired  characteristics. 
This  is  clearly  the  more  mechanical  doctrine.     The  Darwin- 


196  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

ian-Weismannian  theory,  on  the  contrary,  amounts  to  a 
practical  denial  of  the  primacy  of  the  environment  in  the 
business  of  inheritance.  Weismann  finds  the  true  secret 
of  inheritance  in  congenital  conditions  (the  "back-door 
process"  of  Professor  James)  and  denies  altogether  the 
transmissibility  of  modifications  acquired  during  the  life- 
time of  the  individual  organism.1 

This  doctrine  of  congenital  heredity  was  at  first  con- 
nected directly  with  a  theory  of  natural  selection,  which 
virtually  left  the  whole  process  of  variation  to  accident. 
In  this  form  the  Weismannian  theory  seemed  to  inherit 
from  its  Darwinian  association  an  insurmountable  objection 
in  the  fact  that  many  variations  have  evidently  been  pre- 
served which  not  only  would  not  be  of  use  to  the  organism  in 
the  first  stages  but,  on  the  contrary,  would  be  a  positive  det- 
riment. The  horns  of  the  elk  are  an  example  in  question. 
In  order  that  these  may  be  an  advantage  and  not  a  hin- 
drance to  the  individual  that  happens  to  become  their 
bearer,  a  combination  of  other  variations  must  be  coincident 
with  it.  But  a  theory  which  requires  us  to  believe  in  a 
fortuitous  concurrence  of  a  whole  group  of  favorable  varia- 
tions, with  the  absence  of  unfavorable  ones,  makes  too  large 
a  draft  on  our  faith.  It  was  only  when  this  dilemma  was 
relieved  by  the  suggestion  of  a  method  which  seems  to  have 
lifted  the  business  of  variation  largely  out  of  the  rut  of 
accident  in  which  Darwin  left  it,  that  the  Weismannian 
theory  really  attained  to  solid  ground.  The  case  in  hand 
shows  the  close  interdependence  of  evolution  and  heredity, 
inasmuch  as  the  solution  we  speak  of  arose  in  connection 
with  the  agencies  of  evolution  rather  than  with  those  of 
heredity,  although  the  seeming  deadlock  in  regard  to  hered- 

1  Until  recently  the  leading  biologists  in  America  held  to  some 
form  of  the  Lamarckian  view  of  heredity,  while  in  Great  Britain  and 
on  the  Continent  the  Weissmannian  seemed  to  prevail.  At  present, 
however,  the  prevailing  tendency  seems  to  be  toward  the  doctrine 
of  Weissmann.  Romanes  appears  to  have  been  the  last  impressive 
advocate  of  the  doctrine  of  Lamarck  and  Spencer. 


chap.  in.  ORGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  197 

ity  no  doubt  supplied  an  important  motive  to  the  investiga- 
tion. The  Darwinians,  as  a  rule,  trust  to  natural  selection 
as  the  one  efficient  agent  in  bringing  about  development,  ad- 
mitting other  agencies,  of  course,  but  assigning  to  them  a 
subordinate  role.  Now,  natural  selection,  as  it  has  ordi- 
narily been  conceived,  rests  on  two  pillars,  (1)  variations 
in  the  organism  which  are  regarded  as  fortuitous,  (2)  the 
action  of  the  environment  upon  the  organism.  The  whole 
activity  of  the  organism  is  represented  as  a  struggle  for  exist- 
ence in  which  those  organisms  that  are  most  successful  in 
adapting  themselves  to  their  environments  and  to  changes 
in  their  environments  have  the  best  chance  for  survival  and 
thus  prove  themselves  the  fittest.  The  process  of  success- 
ful adaptation  is  one,  then,  that  depends  on  the  concur- 
rence of  variations  in  the  organism  with  favorable  changes 
in  its  environment,  so  that  when  a  change  occurs  which  puts 
a  premium  on  the  existence  of  large  antlers  on  the  elk's 
head,  these,  fortuitously  appearing,  give  an  advantage  to 
their  fortunate  possessor  in  the  struggle  for  existence  and 
thus  prove  him  the  fittest  to  survive. 

The  great  weakness  of  natural  selection,  in  its  common 
form  at  least,  consists  in  the  fact  that  it  depends  so  large- 
ly on  fortuitous  circumstances.  That  a  favorable  varia- 
tion should  fortuitously  coincide  with  the  appearance  of  a 
certain  favorable  juncture  in  the  environment  which  also 
is  fortuitous,  is  something  that  may  happen  repeatedly, 
but  that  it  should  occur  so  uniformly  as  to  explain  the 
evolution  of  living  species  is  a  supposition  which  strains  our 
credulity.  Another  difficulty  which  has  beset  natural  selec- 
tion is  the  one  we  have  pointed  out  above ;  the  fact  that  the 
variation  itself,  as  for  instance  the  antlers  of  the  elk,  with- 
out an  accompaniment  of  other  variations,  would  prove 
detrimental  rather  than  otherwise  to  its  possessor  and 
would  act,  not  toward  his  survival,  but  toward  his  elimina- 
tion. Now,  it  was  owing  to  these  difficulties  chiefly  that 
biologists  formerly  clung  to  the  Lamarckian  theory  who 
otherwise  would  have  been  predisposed  toward  Darwinism. 


198  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

The  Lamarckians  presuppose  a  certain  selective  function 
on  the  part  of  the  organism  by  which,  without  modifying 
in  any  sense  the  influence  of  environment,  it  is  able  by  the 
processes  of  use  and  disuse  to  adapt  itself  to  environmental 
changes.  Thus,  when  surface  vegetation  grows  scarce  and 
browsing  animals  are  driven  to  the  trees  for  sustenance 
the  long  neck  of  the  giraffe  becomes  advantageous  and  is 
liul her  developed  simply  out  of  the  effort  of  animals  to 
reach  the  height  necessary  to  obtain  the  desired  nutriment. 
Lamarckism  here  supplies  an  intelligible  reason  and  a 
vera  causa,  though  a  very  inadequate  one,  where  Darwin- 
ism rests  on  pure  accident;  and  this  seems  to  secure  to 
it  a  decided  advantage.  The  Lamarckians,  as  we  have 
seen,  combine  with  this  theory  of  evolution  a  doctrine  of 
heredity  which  involves  the  inheritance  of  modifications 
acquired  during  the  lifetime  of  the  individual.  Mr. 
Spencer  has  made  us  familiar  with  this  concept  of  the  life- 
process  ;  an  organism  which  grows  up  as  a  responsive  center 
registering  all  the  effects  of  the  environment  in  its  own 
constitution  and  transmitting  a  faithful  copy  of  them  to 
its  descendants.  Mr.  Spencer's  theory  is  one  in  which 
not  only  is  the  multitude  fed  but  the  twelve  baskets  full 
of  fragments  are  gathered  up  and  saved  for  the  children. 

Whatever  may  be  urged  in  behalf  of  this  theory  of  in- 
heritance the  truth  is  that  it  has  been  abandoned  generally 
by  biologists,  who  tend  strongly  to  some  form  of  the 
Weismannian  doctrine.  Assuming,  then,  that  the  Lamarck- 
ian  view  of  heredity  has  been  on  the  whole  discredited 
and  that  the  direct  inheritance  of  acquired  characters  will 
have  to  be  given  up,  the  vital  question  which  remains  is  one 
that  concerns  directly  the  agencies  of  evolution.  The 
Darwinian  theory  of  natural  selection  in  its  ordinary  form 
is  too  much  beset  by  accident  and  fortuitous  concurrence 
to  satisfy  the  better  minds  among  the  biologists.  This 
has  led,  as  we  saw,  to  a  lingering  attachment  to  the 
Lamarckian  doctrine  which  seems  to  give  a  degree  of 
guidance    and    determinateness    where    Darwinism    leaves 


chap.  in.  OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  199 

everything  to  accident.  But  biologists  have  been  op- 
pressed with  the  feeling  that  the  Lamarckian  concep- 
tions are  both  inadequate  and  in  some  respects  mystical. 
Even  Lamarckism  has  no  reason  to  assign  for  the  survival  of 
variations  during  the  period  when  they  would  be  detrimental 
rather  than  serviceable  to  the  organism.  Moreover,  the  La- 
marckian is  too  much  given  to  postulating  an  innate  disposi- 
tion as  one  of  the  factors  of  evolution,  thus  committing  the 
mistake  of  imposing  a  scientific  duty  on  a  metaphysical  da- 
tum. In  view  of  this  the  only  alternative  open  seemed  to 
be  natural  selection  in  its  ordinary  form,  which  also  had 
proved  unsatisfactory  for  an  opposite  reason.  The 
biologists  seemed  thus  to  be  beaten  helplessly  from  pillar 
to  post,  when  a  happy  inspiration  came  to  three  men  who 
had  been  observing  the  field  from  different  points  of  view. 
One  of  these  was  Henry  F.  Osborn,  a  pure  biologist,  who, 
approaching  the  subject  from  the  side  of  paleontology, 
with  a  side-light  from  psychology,  and  becoming  dissatis- 
fied with  both  natural  selection  and  the  Lamarckian  theory 
of  use  and  disuse,  developed  a  hypothesis  which  he  called 
ontogenic  adaptation  and  put  forth  as  an  explanatory 
theory  of  the  definite  and  determinate  variation  which  is 
found  in  nature.  Professor  Osborn  distinguished  between 
two  species  of  adaptation,  the  ontogenic  and  the  phylo- 
genic,  and  it  is  in  the  field  of  the  former  that  he  finds  the 
phemonenon  of  determinate  variation.  His  hypothesis,  as 
he  relates  it,  is  briefly  as  follows.  "That  ontogenetic 
adaptation  is  of  a  very  profound  character.  It  enables 
animals  and  plants  to  survive  very  critical  changes  in  their 
environment.  Thus  all  the  individuals  of  a  race  are 
similarly  modified  over  such  long  periods  of  time  that  very 
gradually  congenital  variations  which  happen  to  coincide 
with  the  ontogenic  adaptive  modifications  are  collected 
and  become  phylogenic.  Thus  there  would  result  an  appar- 
ent but  not  real  transmission  of  acquired  characters."  Now 
the  principle  involved  in  what  Professor  Osborn  calls  "on- 
togenic adaptation"  had  been  discovered  about  the  same 


200  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

time  independently  by  a  distinguished  psychologist,  Pro- 
fessor Mark  Baldwin,  and  a  no  less  distinguished  naturalist 
who  had  been  specially  interested  in  the  problems  of  in- 
stinct and  intelligence,  Professor  Lloyd  Morgan.  To 
Baldwin  is  due  the  name  that  has  been  finally  adopted, 
organic  selection,  in  which  both  Osborn  and  Morgan  con- 
cur. Baldwin  and  Morgan  have  also  worked  out  a  termi- 
nology which  Osborn  accepts.  They  limit  the  term  variation 
to  congenital  changes,  substitute  modification  for  onto- 
genic  variation,  using  the  term  organic  selection  for  the 
process  by  which  individual  adaptation  leads  and  guides 
evolution,  and  orlhoplasy  for  the  definite  and  determinate 
results.  The  essentials  of  the  theory  thus  seem  to  have 
been  arrived  at  by  three  separate  minds  working  inde- 
pendently in  three  distinct  fields.  And  the  indications  are 
that  the  "New  Factor  in  Evolution,"  to  quote  the  caption 
of  one  of  Baldwin's  papers,  has  come  to  stay  and  that  it 
will  prove  an  important  agent  in  securely  grounding  the 
whole  process  of  evolution.1 

Let  us  now  attempt  to  state  the  situation  in  biology  in 
terms  that  will  appeal  to  the  intelligence  of  the  average 
laymen.  The  doctrine  of  evolution  as  held  in  biology  is 
that  the  species  of  living  animals  and  plants  which  exist  in 
nature  at  present  have  developed  from  a  few  original  and 
simple  forms,  all  of  which  are,  of  course,  reducible  to  the 
primary  life-substance,  protoplasm.  These  simple  forms, 
or  organisms  as  we  shall  call  them,  have  had  a  history  of 
growth  and  development  in  the  course  of  which  two  oppo- 
site processes  have  gone  forward  together,  (1)  the  differ- 
entiation of  the  simple  structures  into  more  complex  struc- 

1  While  Organic  Selection  is  thus  the  product  of  three  workers 
ia  the  field,  the  principle  which  it  involves  seems  to  have  been  in 
the  air,  as  it  were,  for  some  time.  The  writer  remembers  a  con- 
versation with  his  colleague,  W.  B.  Scott,  some  ten  years  ago,  in 
which  the  latter  outlined  a  conception  almost  identical  with  that 
which  was  later  embodied  in  the  term  organic  selection.  It  seems 
to  be  an  instance  of  the  formulation  of  a  doctrine  which  was  germ- 
inating in  the  minds  of  many  others. 


chap.  in.  OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  201 

tures  and  into  different  types  of  structure  called  species, 
(2)  the  integration  or  consolidation  of  structures  so 
that  they  become  more  perfectly  organized  into  a  unity 
and  more  definite  in  the  performance  of  their  functions. 
Mr.  Spencer  points  out  how  there  is  a  concurrent  de- 
velopment of  both  structure  and  function  involved  in 
the  whole  process  of  evolution.  Now  the  causes  or  condi- 
tions of  this  development  are  to  be  found  partly  in  those 
surroundings  of  the  organism  which  are  called  its  environ- 
ment and  partly  in  the  living  constitution  of  the  organism 
itself.  The  former  causes  are  called  phylogenic,  while  to 
the  latter  the  name  ontogenic  is  applied.  Biologists,  as 
we  know,  split  into  parties  on  the  question  as  to  which  of 
these  causes  is  the  more  important;  those  who  hold  that 
the  environment  is  the  more  important  factor  ascribing 
the  major  role  to  the  phylogenic  forces,  while  those  who 
believe  the  constitution  of  the  organism  to  be  the  more  im- 
portant place  the  major  emphasis  on  the  ontogenic  forces. 
This  distinction,  as  we  have  seen,  influences  the  whole  theory 
of  evolution  and  heredity,  the  former  being  the  name  of  the 
advancing  process  described  above  while  the  latter  desig- 
nates the  means  by  which  the  accumulating  results  are 
conserved  and  made  permanent  possessions  of  the  race.  It 
is  clear,  then,  how  our  conception  of  evolution  will  be  shaped 
by  our  theory  of  the  causes  which  determine  it.  But  this 
theory  will  also  influence  our  notions  of  heredity,  for  if 
we  put  the  greater  emphasis  on  the  environment  and  the 
phylogenic  causes  and  look  on  the  organism  as,  in  a  great 
measure,  a  center  of  simple  responses  to  its  forces,  we  shall 
be  disposed  to  look  upon  the  organism  as  a  simple  register 
of  modifications  induced  by  the  environment,  and  heredity 
as  the  means  by  which  this  register  is  preserved  and  handed 
down.  No  distinction  between  congenital  and  acquired 
modifications  will  seem  to  be  vital,  and  heredity  will  be 
regarded  as  applying  impartially  to  all  modifications 
whether  congenital  or  acquired.  If,  however,  we  put  the 
major  emphasis  on  the  constitution  of  the  organism  itself 


202  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

and  on  the  operation  of  the  ontogenic  causes,  the  dis- 
tinction between  congenital  and  acquired  becomes  vital 
and  the  registry  of  heredity  is  restricted  mainly  to  con- 
genital modifications.  We  have  here  the  ground  of  the 
distinction  between  the  Lamarekian  and  Weismannian 
theories  of  heredity. 

If,  finally,  we  pass  from  the  consideration  of  processes 
to  that  of  the  agencies  by  means  of  which  these  processes 
are  realized  we  find  that  the  field  is  occupied  by  two  sets  of 
theorists  who  divide  on  snbstantially  the  same  fundamental 
issues.  The  Darwinians  in  general  regard  natural  selec- 
tion as  the  principal,  if  not  exclusive,  agent  in  bringing 
about  the  results.  Now.  natural  selection  recognizes  both 
the  terms  in  evolution,  the  organism  and  the  environment : 
the  phylogenic  as  well  as  the  ontogenic  causes.  But  natural 
selection  puts  the  main  emphasis  on  the  movements  of  the 
environment.  Given  the  organism  in  an  environment  which 
changes  or  is  liable  to  change,  how  does  this  organism  adapt 
itself  to  these  changes  so  as  to  promote  its  own  survival? 
Natural  selection  answers  by  pointing  to  fortuitous  varia- 
tions which  occur  in  the  organism  and  luckily  coincide 
with  changes  taking  place  in  the  environment.  These 
environmental  changes  have  the  right  of  way,  so  that 
if  the  fortuitous  variation  of  the  organism  does  not  hap- 
pen to  fit  into  them,  it  suffers  the  penalty  and  is  sup- 
pressed. Clearly,  natural  selection  in  its  ordinary  form  is 
hard  on  the  organism,  leaving  its  fortunes  pretty  much  in 
the  hands  of  happy  accident,  Lamarckism,  as  we  saw,  rep- 
resents a  theory  that  has  met  favor  from  those  biologists  who 
have  not  been  ready  to  take  out  an  accident  policy  on  the 
bank  of  natural  selection.  The  Lamarckians  have  been  im- 
pressed by  what  Professor  Osborn  calls  "the  evidence  for 
definite  or  determinate  variation' '  and  have  fallen  back  on 
the  original  constitution  and  the  characteristic  function  of 
the  organism  (use  and  disuse)  for  its  explanation.  The  old 
Lamarekian  was.  in  the  first  place,  a  mystic,  postulating  an 
innate  tendency  in  living  matter  itself.     In  this  he  is  fol- 


chap.  in.  OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  203 

lowed  by  few  contemporary  biologists  of  any  school.  But 
he  was,  secondly,  an  ontogenist  in  his  theory  of  natural 
agencies,  pointing  to  the  active  efforts  of  the  organism  itself, 
displaying  themselves  in  the  use  or  disuse  of  organs  which 
were  favorable  or  unfavorable  to  survival,  as  the  explanation 
of  the  determinate  course  of  evolution.  In  this  he  seemed 
rather  to  be  pointing  in  a  right  direction  than  developing 
an  explanation  that  could  be  taken  as  adequate.  For  if  he 
was  seeking  to  lift  the  process  of  adaptation  out  of  the 
limbo  of  accident  he  was  not  quite  successful  in  his  attempt. 
His  own  theory  rests  on  the  supposition  that  the  variations 
which  are  preserved  will  be  useful  from  the  start.  But  this 
cannot  be  maintained.  The  increment  of  neck  on  the 
giraffe  or  the  antlers  on  the  elk  would  either  be  a  disad- 
vantage if  not  accompanied  by  a  group  of  other  variations, 
or,  they  would  be  useless  unless  so  marked  that  use  could 
not  account  for  them. 

The  layman  will  understand,  then,  that  it  is  the  virtual 
failure  of  both  the  rival  theories  to  explain  the  process  of 
adaptation  that  has  called  forth  the  latest  moves  in  the  field 
of  biological  theory.  The  concurrent  discovery  of  organic 
selection  by  three  independent  workers,  each  a  leader  in 
his  own  field,  gives  an  unusual  prestige  to  the  new  factor 
which  is  thus  brought  forward.  How,  then,  is  this  new 
factor  to  be  understood?  The  problem  is  that  of  definite 
and  determinate  adaptation,  a  phenomenon  that  is  found  in 
all  cases  where  determinate  results  are  reached :  in  the  case 
of  the  horse's  hoof,  the  giraffe's  neck,  the  elk's  horns,  the 
aquatic  quadruped's  learning  to  stand  on  its  hind  legs 
and  use  its  forelegs  for  wings.  Stated  in  its  most  general 
form,  it  is  the  question  why  we  find  evolution  working 
everywhere  along  definite  lines  and  toward  determinate 
results.  This  is  the  fact  which  neither  natural  selection 
nor  the  Lamarckian  theory  are  able  to  explain.  Both  leave 
results  too  much  without  guidance ;  too  much  to  the  sphere 
of  accident  and  irrationality.  AVhat  organic  selection 
does   in   this  case   is  to   settle   upon   the   organism    itself, 


204  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

as  the  most  important  factor,  and  upon  congenital  variations 
as  the  only  ones  of  primary  value.  Starting  with  the  postu- 
late of  the  organism  as  the  subject  of  congenital  variations 
which  it  is  the  business  of  the  theory  somehow  to  get  con- 
served and  securely  placed  outside  of  the  individual 
history,  in  the  phylogenic  register  of  the  race,  its  effect 
is  to  remove  the  stress  of  the  movement  from  the  individual 
variation  and  put  it  on  a  general  tendency  or  adaptability 
of  the  organism,  an  adaptability  that  is  likely  to  remain 
the  same  substantially  over  long  stretches  of  time  and  that 
renders  it  possible,  when  any  variation  does  occur,  as  for 
example  the  appearance  of  antlers  on  the  elk's  head,  for 
the  individual  organism  in  which  it  appears  to  adjust 
its  whole  constitution  to  this  change.  This  adjustment 
will  involve,  for  example,  a  redistribution  of  the  life- 
forces  and  a  larger  development  of  the  bones  and  muscles 
of  the  elk's  neck  and  shoulders  at  the  expense  of  the 
more  remote  parts  of  his  body.  We  have  here  an  ex- 
planation of  what  the  rival  theories  left  to  accident,  the 
survival  of  a  variation  that  in  itself  would  in  its  first 
stages  be  detrimental  or  at  least  not  definitely  useful. 
This  survival  is  secured  by  a  species  of  blanket-mortgage 
which  shields  the  young  variation  by  hiding  it  in  a  group 
until  its  majority  has  been  reached. 

No  theory  is  obliged  to  show  how  variations  may  survive 
outside  of  definite  and  determinate  limits,  for  evolution  has 
its  negative  side  and  its  unwritten  history  of  variations 
which  failed  to  survive  either  because  they  did  not  fall  in 
with  the  general  trend  of  the  organism  in  which  they  ap- 
peared, or  because  they  were  able  to  find  no  point  of  accom- 
modation to  the  environment.  The  great  fact  which  a  theory 
may  be  held  to  explain  is  that  of  determinate  variation  whose 
history  is  written  in  the  results  of  evolution.  Every  animal 
and  every  plant,  where  the  stages  of  its  history  have  been 
successfully  traced,  become  a  registry  of  the  survival  of  a 
series  of  variations  which  tend  along  definite  lines  and  to- 
ward determinate  results.     The  theory  of  organic  selection 


chap.  in.  ORGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  205 

by  connecting  this  series  of  fortunate  individual  variations 
with  a  wider  sweep  of  organic  susceptibilities  for  modifica- 
tions which  include  whole  groups  and  fields  of  changes,— 
but  which  move,  nevertheless,  along  definite  and  determin- 
ate lines,— indefinitely  narrows  the  range  of  accidental 
and  fortuitous  conjunction  and  makes  the  foundations  of 
the  science  by  so  much  the  more  rational. 

This  will  become  apparent  if  we  consider  two  or  three 
circumstances.  We  have  already  pointed  out  how  the 
theory  of  organic  selection  accounts  for  the  preservation 
of  a  variation  during  what  we  may  call  the  period  of  its 
minority.  It  is  nursed  until  it  has  reached  the  point  of 
growth  where  it  becomes  in  itself  a  useful  possession. 
But,  objectively,  the  environment  may  be  unfriendly,  or  at 
least  indifferent.  The  closeness  of  the  trees  may  interfere 
with  the  horns  of  the  elk,  while  yet  his  peaceful  environ- 
ment renders  his  horns  of  little  use  for  defense.  In  this 
case  the  antlered  elk  ought  to  be  eliminated.  But  organic 
selection  supplies  a  reason  why  he  may  be  able  to  survive 
even  this  period  of  stress.  In  the  first  place  the  general 
adaptability  of  his  organism  to  the  new  variation  would 
tend  to  put  him  in  a  position  where  he  would  be  able  to 
maintain  himself  with  his  own  species.  But  in  addition 
to  this,  organic  selection  shows  how  the  waiting  game  may 
be  successfully  played  so  that  the  favorable  change  in  the 
environment,  however  long  it  may  be  delayed,  will  find  him 
there  awaiting  its  coming.  The  antlered  elk  will  then  have 
his  day  because  in  the  new  conditions,  and  the  new  and 
more  formidable  defense  he  must  put  up  in  order  to 
defend  his  own  life,  his  antlers  have  found  their  true 
mission. 

The  problem  of  variation  which  the  new  factor  of 
organic  selection  is  brought  forward  to  explain  is  at 
present  the  most  vital  issue  in  biology.  The  value  of 
organic  selection  is  recognized  by  such  authorities  as 
Professors  Poulton,  Conn  and  Headly,  not  to  name  many 
others,  but  its  final  significance  for  evolution  is  still  in 


206  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

debate.  Poulton  is  strenuous  in  maintaining  the  posi- 
tion that  organic  selection,  while  a  valuable  extension 
of  the  principle  of  natural  selection,  is  to  be  held  subordi- 
nate to  it  as  one  of  its  methods  of  working.  Natural 
selection  he  still  regards  as  the  one  supreme  agency  in 
evolution.  To  this  contention  Baldwin  and  Lloyd  Morgan 
are  disposed  to  yield  at  least  a  qualified  assent;  while 
Osborn  refuses  to  regard  organic  selection  as  simply  a 
mode  of  natural  selection,  but  proposes  to  substitute  it  for 
both  natural  selection  and  the  Lamarckian  principle  of  the 
inheritance  of  acquired  characteristics;  of  course  within 
the  field  of  definite  and  determinate  variations  to  which  it 
belongs.  With  Osborn 's  view,  E.  B.  Wilson,  T.  H.  Mor- 
gan, not  to  mention  others,  are  in  substantial  agree- 
ment. The  point  of  the  difference  is  one  that  the  layman 
may  not  readily  grasp.  If  we  call  the  general  capacity  of 
the  organism  to  adapt  itself  constitutionally  to  individual 
variations,  its  power  of  self-adaptation,  or  better  still,  its 
plasticity,  then  it  will  be  found  that  the  point  at  issue  has 
reference  to  the  origin  of  this  plasticity.  Osborn  and 
those  who  agree  with  him  admit  that  in  some  cases  the 
plasticity  of  an  organism  may  be  traceable  to  natural 
selection,  as  for  example  "where  an  organism  has  been 
restored  to  an  environment  which  some  of  its  ancestors 
have  experienced,"  but  they  contend  that  the  burden  of 
proof  will  always  be  with  the  advocate  of  natural  selection. 
The  whole  phenomenon  of  plasticity  is  explicable  only 
when  we  regard  the  original  life-substance  as  endowed  with 
a  plastic  quality  that  clothes  it  by  nature  with  the  power 
of  self-adaptation.  The  opponents  of  this  view,  which  I 
understand  to  include  Baldwin  and  Lloyd  Morgan  as  well 
as  Poulton,  contend  that  the  only  plasticity  which  can  be 
recognized  is  one  that  is  itself  produced  by  natural  selec- 
tion. I  think  we  have  here  the  last  and  one  of  the  most 
significant  manifestations  of  that  line  of  fundamental 
cleavage  which  has  tended  to  separate  biologists  into  two 
different   schools   on   all   the    fundamental   issues   of   the 


chap.  in.  OEGANIG  MOVEMENTS.  207 

science.  It  is  the  old  issue  between  the  more  mechanical 
and  the  more  vitalistic  tendencies  taking  on  its  newest 
form.  The  question  at  issue  between  the  parties  seems  to 
narrow  itself  down  to  a  point  which  to  superficial  observation 
might  be  negligible  without  detriment  to  any  of  the  vital 
interests  of  the  science;  yet  this  would  no  doubt  be  a 
mistake,  inasmuch  as  Osborn  urges  against  the  Morgan- 
Baldwin-Poulton  view,  ''That  the  remarkable  powers  of 
self-adaptation  which  in  many  cases  are  favorable  to  the 
survival  of  the  individual,  are  also  in  many  cases  detri- 
mental to  the  race,  as  where  a  maimed  or  mutilated  embryo 
by  regeneration  reaches  an  adult  or  reproductive  stage." 
"It  is  obvious,"  he  continues,  "that  reproduction  from 
imperfect  individuals  would  be  decidedly  detrimental,  yet 
from  the  view  taken  by  the  above  authors,  such  reproduc- 
tion would  be  necessary  to  secure  the  power  of  plastic 
modification  for  the  race."  Let  us  suppose,  now,  that 
plasticity  is  in  all  cases  a  product  of  natural  selection;  it 
would  follow  that,  notwithstanding  the  function  assigned 
to  organic  selection,  all  directive  or  guiding  agency  had 
been  taken  away  from  living  matter  itself  and  hence  from 
the  organism.  The  organism  derives  its  self-adaptability 
to  change  which  qualifies  it  for  the  office  of  definite  and 
determinate  evolution,  from  adaptations  it  has  already 
made  and  so  on  ad  infinitum.  We  thus  strip  the  organ- 
ism of  all  directive  and  determinative  agency  and  locate 
this  in  the  environment,  reserving  for  the  organism  only 
blind  variability  at  first  which  is  trained  into  determinate- 
ness  under  the  tutelage  of  the  environment.  This  is  the 
doctrine  of  those  who  aim  to  reduce  biology  as  much 
as  possible  to  the  strict  requirements  of  mechanical 
science.  On  the  other  hand  the  vitalists,  while  they  find  it 
more  difficult  than  do  their  opponents  to  maintain  their 
scientific  orthodoxy,  are,  nevertheless,  representing  a 
definite  and  intelligible  tendency  of  the  science.  Just  as 
the  more  mechanical  tendency  in  physics  has  arrayed 
against  it  the  opposing  tendency  of  the  dynamists,  so  here 


208  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

in  biology  we  find  those  who  are  disposed  to  find  in  the 
original  elements  of  the  life-movement  the  most  important 
norm  of  that  determinateness  in  the  process  which  has 
supplied  biologists  with  some  of  their  most  vital  problems. 
If  we  study  the  mode  of  selection  which  has  been  called 
organic  we  shall  find  that  it  tends  to  substitute  a  species  of 
wave-movement  in  the  trend  of  organisms  for  that  of  in- 
dividual variation.  The  motion  seems  to  be  one  of  ebb  and 
flow,  the  group  of  possible  variations  in  a  certain  field  of 
experience  being  determined  by  the  swell  and  conformation 
of  the  tide.  This  is  something  that  organic  selection  as  a 
descriptive  name  of  a  process  does  not  explain.  Why 
should  there  be  organic  rather  than  individual  selection, 
and  how  does  it  operate?  The  answer  to  the  first  question 
has  already  been  given.  It  is  more  explanatory  of  actual 
history  than  any  other  theory  that  has  been  proposed. 
How,  then,  are  we  to  conceive  the  movement  involved  in 
organic  selection  as  being  realized?  This  is  a  question 
of  modus  in  answer  to  which  Baldwin  (and  he  is  one 
of  a  group  of  psychological  biologists  who  suggest  a 
function  of  mind)  suggests  the  agency  of  pleasurable  and 
painful  consciousness.  According  to  the  law  of  circular 
motion,  which  Baldwin  works  out  in  his  Mental  Develop- 
in  <  nt  of  the  Child  and  the  Race,  it  is  suggested  that  the  tide 
which  represents  the  fullness  of  life  would,  by  virtue  of  its 
pleasurableness,  not  only  tend  to  its  own  continuance  but 
also  to  the  midt {plication  and  preservation  of  favorable 
variations,  while  in  the  case  of  the  ebb  of  life  which  would 
be  accompanied  by  a  painful  consciousness,  the  effect  would 
be  the  opposite.  An  explanation  of  the  survival  of  favora- 
ble, and  the  suppression  of  unfavorable,  variations  is  thus 
suggested  in  the  pleasure-pain  aspect  of  consciousness. 
Baldwin,  while  not  going  so  far  as  to  propose  the  pleas- 
ure-pain consciousness  as  a  vera  causa  generally  pres- 
ent in  evolution,  makes  the  suggestion  that  something 
analogous  to  it  operates  from  the  beginning  to  the  end  of 
the  life-movement. 


chap.  in.  ORGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  209 

Hitherto  we  have  concerned  ourselves  exclusively  with 
the  concepts  and  problems  of  biological  science.  We  now 
turn  to  the  problem  of  the  synthesis  of  natural  science  with 
metaphysics  in  the  field  of  organic  movements.  We  have 
seen  how  the  genetic  process  falls  under  the  operation  of 
the  principle  of  natural  causation  in  time.  Our  review 
of  the  problems  of  biology  and  their  proposed  solutions 
shows  that  an  explanation  in  order  to  be  satisfactory  must, 
in  the  last  analysis,  satisfy  the  requirements  of  natural 
causation.  It  must  propound  causes  which  are  verae  causae 
and  the  operation  of  these  causes  must  lie  in  the  field  of 
possible  determination.  Moreover,  the  biologist,  like  the 
physicist,  deals  with  his  world  under  the  general  notion  of 
phenomena  and  ground.  We  have  seen  that  physics  con- 
nects its  phenomena  as  effects  with  the  operation  of  under- 
lying substances  or  forces  to  which  it  applies  the  name 
matter.  Now,  the  material  or  ground-term  in  the  field  of 
the  organic  is  the  life-substance  itself,  protoplasm  or  its 
constituent,  the  living  cell.  It  appears,  then,  that  the 
ground-term  in  biology  is  also  to  a  degree  phenomenalized. 
We  can  discover  the  distinguishing  characteristics  of  living 
matter  (those  which  differentiate  it  from  matter  thai  is  not 
living),  and  the  concept  of  matter  in  biology  is,  so  far 
forth,  more  than  the  concept  of  matter  in  physics.  The 
same  thing  is  true  of  the  concept  of  motion.  The  life- 
movement  is  definable  further  than  the  movements  with 
which  physics  deals  and  its  concept  is  correspondingly 
richer.  Let  us  ask,  then,  in  what  particular  respects  the 
ground-motions  of  biology  are  richer  than  those  of  physics. 
The  answer  may  be  given  in  a  few  words.  The  terms  of  phys- 
ics, as  they  are  conceived  and  employed  in  the  physical  proc- 
esses, have  no  internal  character,  no  qualitative  properties 
which  in  any  sense  influence  the  form  of  their  movements. 
In  biology,  however,  the  primary  matter,  protoplasm,  or  the 
living  cell,  has  an  internal  character.  It  is  plastic,  that  is, 
susceptible  to  qualitative  changes.  Moreover,  it  is  a  debated 
question  among  biologists  whether  this  life-substance  may 
14 


210  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

not  be  originally  plastic  in  determinate  waj^s,— whether,  in 
fact,  it  may  not  be  selective  in  its  very  nature.  If,  now, 
we  turn  to  the  life-movement  itself  we  see  that  it  is  no 
longer  qualitatively  indifferent,  but  that  it  is  overtly  select- 
ive and  discriminating.  It  acts  as  though  it  had  a  taste 
and  as  though  some  things  pleased  it  while  others  it  dis- 
liked. Furthermore,  it  is  clearly  end-seeking.  Its  select- 
iveness  is  not  haphazard,  but  under  the  general  guidance 
of  the  idea  of  what  is  good  for  the  organism.  It  is  this  in 
appearance  at  least.  The  biological  elements  are  richer 
than  the  physical  by  the  whole  diameter  of  their  qualita- 
tive character,  which,  as  we  have  seen,  embraces  original 
plasticity,  selectiveness  and  end-seeking. 

Now  two  main  questions  arise  in  this  connection,  (1) 
To  what  extent  does  this  qualitative  character  of  biology 
transform  it  into  a  teleological  science,  (2)  What  is  the 
vital  connection  between  biology  as  a  natural  science  and  a 
metaphysical  interpretation  of  the  world  ?  The  qualitative 
character  includes,  as  we  saw,  original  plasticity,  selective- 
ness and  end-seeking.  Whatever  our  ultimate  theory  of 
these  qualities  may  be,  on  their  face,  at  least,  they  constitute 
a  teleological  character.  It  cannot  be  denied  that  life  is  in 
some  sense  teleological.  Let  us  ask,  then,  in  what  sense? 
If  we  take  a  process  that  is  teleological  through  and  through 
we  shall  find  that  it  is  not  only  selective  and  end-seeking,- 
but  that  this  teleological  movement  forward  has  its  root 
and  spring  in  the  foresight  of  some  intelligently  conceived 
purpose.  In  short,  the  spring  of  selective  end-seeking  is 
design.  Comparing  a  genetic  movement  with  the  form  of 
complete  teleology  we  find  that  while  in  its  forward  reach, 
that  is,  prospectively,  it  is  teleological,  inasmuch  as  it 
proceeds  selectively  to  the  realization  of  an  end,  yet  regres- 
sively,  or  in  view  of  its  source,  its  origin  is  not  traceable  to 
design  or  purpose.  The  utmost  that  can  be  allowed  here 
is  an  original  spontaneity  which  does  not  act  by  purpose  or 
design  and  in  regard  to  which  it  is  an  open  question 
whether  any  measure  of  determinateness  is  to  be  ascribed 


chap.  in.  OEGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  211 

to  it.  This  being  the  case,  the  genetic  process  in  its  regres- 
sive aspect,  which  is  the  one  of  production,  is  non-teleolog- 
ical  and  subject  to  the  law  of  natural  causation.  Biology 
as  a  natural  science  may  then  admit  teleology  and  teleolog- 
ically  operating  forces  in  the  prospective  sense.  But  it 
cannot  admit  these  in  the  retrospective  sense. 

It  may  be  asked  in  this  connection  whether  such  a  re- 
striction of  teleology  would  exclude  purpose  and  design  al- 
together as  causes.  To  which  we  answer  that  it  would  not 
as  individual  agents.  Among  conscious  individuals  the 
purposive  form  of  agency  may  work  to  the  production 
of  results  which  possess  biological  value,  that  is,  they 
further  life.  But  in  a  scientific  construction  these  pur- 
poses and  designs  will  be  ranked,  along  with  other  causes 
and  conditions,  under  the  general  principle  of  natural 
causation.  The  truth  is  that  biology  may  deal  to  any 
extent  with  teleological  forces  and  agencies  so  long  as  it 
remains  true  to  natural  causation  as  the  principle  under 
which  their  activity  is  ultimately  construed.  This  conclu- 
sion will  hold  good  in  view  of  both  the  mechanical  and  the 
vitalistic  tendencies  in  biology.  The  most  that  the  extrem- 
est  vitalist  who  avoids  mysticism  would  claim  for  his  orig- 
inal life-substance  is  that  its  primary  properties  are  such  as 
to  determine  in  some  measure  its  subsequent  activity.  These 
would  not  be  thought  of  as  emanating  from  innate  design 
or  purpose  in  the  life-substance.  This  residue  of  deter- 
minateness  would  be  ascribed  by  the  more  mechanical 
theorist  to  the  operation  of  natural  selection.  In  neither 
case,  then,  would  teleology  be  brought  in  as  a  vera  causa. 
Given  a  life-substance  with  a  certain  original  constitution, 
which  is  represented  under  the  term  plasticity,  the  schools 
differ  as  to  whether  this  plasticity  is  to  be  regarded  as 
indefinite  and  indeterminate  or  as  a  somewhat  definite  and 
determinate  susceptibility  to  variations.  In  the  one  case 
the  ontogenic  factor  is  minimized,  while  in  the  other  it  is 
magnified.  In  both  cases  the  results  contemplated  are 
assumed  to  be  brought  about  by  natural  causes. 


212  SYNTHESIS.  fart  ii. 

We  come,  then,  to  the  metaphysical  question  proper  and 
the  point  here  is  to  determine,  not  how  the  biologist  may  be 
a  metaphysician,  but  rather  how  the  limits  of  his  science 
will  lead  him  by  rational  considerations  to  a  metaphysical 
interpretation  of  the  world.  And  by  way  of  a  preliminary 
it  needs  to  be  clearly  understood  that  there  is  no  question 
here  of  substituting  the  categories  of  metaphysics  for  the 
processes  of  science.  The  metaphysician  is  as  jealous  as 
the  biologist  himself  of  the  prerogatives  of  science,  and  if 
metaphysics  insists  that  the  world  must,  in  the  last  analy- 
sis, be  referred  regressively  to  design  and  purpose,  this 
requirement  is  made  in  the  interest  of  the  biologist  as  a 
metaphysician  and  not  as  a  natural  scientist.  It  is  a 
claim  that  is  urged  on  the  ground  simply  and  solely  that  it 
requires  a  synthesis  of  the  scientific  and  metaphysical  in- 
terpretation to  give  us  the  full  meaning  of  our  world. 
Let  it  be  understood,  then,  that  metaphysics,  in  proposing 
its  teleological  explanation  of  the  world,  is  not  proposing 
teleology  or  purpose  as  a  substitute  for  natural  causation. 
It  is  only  contending  that  natural  causation,  however  far 
it  may  be  carried,  does  not  exhaust  the  meaning  of  the 
world,  but  everywhere  needs  to  be  supplemented  by  the 
notion  of  teleology  or  purpose  as  supplying  to  it  a  com- 
pletely rational  ground. 

Let  us  then  grapple  directly  with  the  metaphysical 
question.  We  have  seen  that,  in  general,  metaphysics 
finds  its  vital  connection  with  science  by  translating  the 
ground-term  of  science  into  its  own  ground-terms  of  idea 
and  prevision.  Now  the  ground-term  of  biology  is  its 
original  matter  or  life-substance.  This,  as  we  have  seen, 
has  been  qualified  with  a  character  called  plasticity.  If 
we  analyze  the  notion  of  plasticity  we  find  that  it  implies 
at  least  passive  adaptability  to  changing  conditions  by 
which  it  may  be  affected.  But  the  notion  of  passive 
adaptability  is  not  ultimate.  We  cannot  stop  with  mere 
passiveness.  Passivity  implies  more  active  and  aggressive 
initiative    somewhere.     And    just    here    theories    divide. 


chap.  in.  ORGANIC  MOVEMENTS.  213 

The  vitalists  contend  that  a  certain  active  initiative  must 
be  ascribed  to  the  life-substance  itself,  while  their  oppo- 
nents deny  this  and  ascribe  all  active  initiative  to  the 
environment.  Both  schools  concede  that  active  initiative 
must  exist  somewhere  and  that  mere  passivity  cannot  be 
allowed  to  stand  alone.  The  more  mechanical  school  of 
biologists  traces  the  whole  active  initiative  of  the  evolution 
movement,  in  the  last  analysis,  to  the  environment.  It  is 
an  exclusive  function  of  the  phylogenic  forces,  whereas  the 
vitalists  divide  this  initiative,  referring  an  important  share 
to  the  organism  itself,  while  a  function  is  also  recognized 
as  belonging  to  the  environment.  The  initiative  is  thus 
distributed  between  ontogenic  and  phylogenic  agencies. 

The  common  faith  of  all  schools  is  that  active  initiative 
must  be  found  somewhere  in  the  world  and  that  without  it 
the  life-process  could  not  be  rationally  explained.  Now, 
these  forces  of  initiative  wherever  they  are  to  be  sought  are 
the  verae  causae  of  the  whole  evolution  movement.  Biology 
as  a  natural  science  construes  their  agency  under  the  notion 
of  natural  causation.  But  the  question  comes  up  here  as 
it  comes  up  generally  in  connection  with  the  world  as  a 
whole,  Can  the  principle  of  natural  causation  be  taken  as 
giving  a  complete  and  finally  satisfactory  explanation  of 
the  world?  and  the  answer  must,  I  think,  correspond  with 
the  general  answer.  The  natural-science  account  of  the 
life-movements  is  one  that  conceives  them  to  be  genetically 
teleological,  that  is,  selective  and  end-seeking.  But  regres- 
sively  it  resolves  all  this  teleology  into  the  operation  of 
natural  causation.  But  the  question  arises  regarding 
natural  causation,— Is  it  self-explanatory  or  does  it  point 
to  something  more  ultimate  than  self?  It  obviously  points 
beyond  self,  for  we  have  seen  that  no  agency  can  be  taken 
as  final  and  self-explanatory  except  one  that  includes 
an  intelligent  conception  and  foresight  of  the  result  which 
it  is  selectively  realizing.  In  short,  the  world  must  mean 
something  in  its  inception,  in  order  that  it  may  have  real 
meaning  in  its  outcome.     Applying  this  principle,  we  are 


214  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

led  to  see  the  necessity  of  a  further  interpretation  of  the 
data  on  which  our  natural-science  construction  proceeds. 
Natural  science,  in  dealing  with  the  phenomena  of  life, 
sets  out  with  the  presumption  of  the  operation  of  certain 
forces  which  take  the  active  initiative  in  its  processes. 
These  forces  are  presumed  to  act  in  accordance  with  the 
principle  of  natural  causation,  and  the  whole  scientific 
treatment  of  biological  phenomena  depends  on  the  validity 
of  this  presumption.  We  have  seen,  moreover,  that  the 
metaphysical  interpretation  does  not  call  the  principle  of 
natural  causation  in  question  as  a  valid  principle  of  science ; 
it  simply  calls  in  question  the  presumption  that  such  a 
principle  can  exhaust  the  meaning  of  the  world  or  give  an 
interpretation  which  will  be  completely  and  finally  satis- 
factory. And  the  plea  of  metaphysics  here  as  elsewhere  is 
that  our  world-theory  can  be  rendered  complete  and  satis- 
factory only  when  the  teleology  of  the  genetic  process  is 
referred  back  through  natural  causation  to  an  intelligent 
foresight  and  purpose  which  rest  at  the  heart  of  the  world 
and  comprehend  and  ground  all  its  processes. 

It  is  to  be  understood  that  the  reference  of  the  world, 
whether  the  field  of  phenomena  in  question  be  that  of 
biology  or  some  other  branch  of  science,  to  intelligence  and 
purpose  as  its  supreme  principle,  is  a  metaphysical  refer- 
ence and  not  a  reference  of  natural  science.  It  is  not  open 
to  the  biologist  as  a  natural  scientist  to  recognize  the 
supremacy  of  any  other  principle  than  that  of  natural 
causation.  But  it  is  open  to  the  biologist  as  a  meta- 
physician to  call  the  final  supremacy  of  that  principle  in 
question  and  to  subordinate  it  to  the  principle  of  intelli- 
gence and  design.  Nay,  it  is  incumbent  on  him  to  do  so, 
and  he  will  find,  if  he  makes  the  right  synthesis,  that  his 
metaphysics  will  not  interfere  with  but  will  rather  vitalize, 
his  pursuit  of  natural  science,  while  on  the  other  hand  he 
will  see  to  it  that  his  metaphysics  is  kept  sane  and  rational 
and  free  from  mysticism  by  the  close'  company  it  keeps 
with  the  concepts  and  methods  of  science.1 

1  See  Appendix  A. 


CHAPTER  IV. 


CONSCIOUS   ACTIVITY. 


Consciousness  is  the  medium  through  which  alone  any- 
thing becomes  conceivable  or  knowable.  It  would  seem  to 
follow  from  this  that  everything  conceivable  or  knowable 
must  exist  as  a  modification  of  consciousness.  Now  there  is 
an  important  sense  in  which  this  is  true.  If  we  avoid  the 
phrase,  exists  solely,  which  begs  the  question,  it  is  a  de- 
fensible position  that  the  objects  of  perception  or  con- 
ception are  modifications  of  consciousness.  Or,  if  we 
assume  for  the  sake  of  the  argument  that  objects  exist 
apart  from  consciousness  we  are  still  taking  a  defensible 
position  when  we  say  that  in  order  to  be  perceived  by  us 
or  conceived  by  us,  they  must  present  themselves  to  us  in 
the  form  of  our  perceptions  or  conceptions.  Thus,  con- 
fining our  view  to  perception,  whatever  the  tree  out  on  the 
campus  may  be  in  itself,  to  me,  as  an  immediate  object  it 
is  a  bunch  of  perceptions.  I  do  not  say  at  this  stage  that 
it  is  nothing  more  than  a  bunch  of  perceptions.  Perhaps 
I  shall  never  have  occasion  to  say  so.  But  the  immediate 
object  which  appears  to  my  senses  is  a  bunch  of  perceptions, 
for  as  I  discover,  and  as  I  am  told,  when  I  shut  my  eyes 
the  object  vanishes;  but  not  the  real  object  which  I  sup- 
pose to  exist  out  in  the  campus.  That  I  presume  to  con- 
tinue in  existence,  while  my  perception,  which  alone  was 
immediately  present  to  my  mind,  has  ceased  to  exist.  This 
is,    no   doubt,    what   Berkeley   meant   when   he    identified 

215 


216  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

existence  with  perception.  The  truth  of  his  assertion  is 
indisputable  if  Ave  confine  the  reality  of  things  perceived 
to  our  perceptions  of  them,  that  is,  to  that  which  is 
immediately  present  to  us  when  we  perceive  them. 

Let  us  suppose,  however,  that  the  intention  is  not  thus 
to  confine  the  reality  of  things,  but  that  we  mean  to  desig- 
nate by  the  real  existence  of  things  all  the  reality  that  can 
be  affirmed  in  connection  with  our  perceptions.  Suppose, 
for  example,  that  I  should  say  of  the  tree  which  I  see  out 
on  the  campus  that  all  the  reality  it  possesses  is  present  to 
me  in  my  perception,  so  that  its  esse  is  exhausted  in  my 
percipi;  then  when  my  perception  ceases  to  exist  the  tree  has 
ceased  also  and  may  be  treated  as  non-existent.  That  is  a 
logical  conclusion  if  Berkeley's  dictum  be  taken  in  an 
unqualified  sense.  But  Berkeley  recognized  the  necessity 
of  qualifying  his  own  dictum,  inasmuch  as  he  found  that 
in  its  unqualified  form  it  was  contradicted  by  the  whole 
behavior  of  the  world.  Things  do  not  act  anywhere  within 
the  range  of  experience  as  we  would  expect  them  to  behave 
if  their  esse  were  wholly  identical  with  our  percipi.  Nor 
does  it  better  the  situation  to  say  that  the  things  we  assume 
to  persist  are  the  perceptions  of  other  minds.  These  other 
minds  do  not  find  them  so;  we  do  not  find  them  so.  The 
perceptions  of  any  mind  are  perishable  while  we  are 
obliged  to  say  that  the  real  thing  persists.  If,  recognizing 
the  dilemma,  we  follow  Berkeley  and  say  that  the  real 
things  are  ideas  in  the  mind  of  God,  we  have  perhaps 
reached  a  sound  metaphysical  position,  but  we  have  made  a 
long  leap  to  get  there.  And  the  theory  of  perception 
remains  as  defective  as  it  was  before.  Hume,  following 
Berkeley,  repudiated  this  metaphysical  leap  and  tried  to 
make  the  best  of  the  theory  of  perception.  To  Hume,  also, 
esse  est  percipi,  but  this  leads  him  to  deny  the  existence  of 
what  we  have  called  the  real  object.  The  only  existent  is 
the  bunch  of  perceptions  which  perishes  in  the  using. 
The  result  is  a  thorough-paced  phenomenalism  which  denies 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  217 

all  substantial  reality  and  finds  the  heart  of  the  world 
losing-  its  identity  at  every  passing  moment. 

Such  a  doctrine,  we  contend  here,  is  its  own  refutation. 
Consciousness  cannot  abide  in  a  world  which  goes  no  deeper 
than  its  own  perceptions.  The  case  is  not  very  much 
improved  by  the  makeshift  of  Mill,  who  also  found  the 
world  of  perception  untenable  and  sought  a  way  out  of  the 
difficulty  by  postulating  perceptions  plus  a  background  of 
permanent  possibilities  of  perception.  It  is  clear,  however, 
that  this  background,  if  not  also  perception,  which  would 
destroy  its  value,  is  only  a  name  for  the  problem  to  be 
solved  and  in  no  sense  a  solution  of  it.  It  has  the  value, 
of  course,  of  being  an  acknowledgement  of  the  reality  of 
the  problem,  but  no  other  significance  can  be  attached  to  it. 
Perhaps,  then,  we  have  been  on  the  wrong  trail  and  we  shall 
find  that  esse  est  concipi.  The  conceptionalists  (rational- 
ists as  they  are  called)  may  have  a  gospel  in  which  we  can 
believe.  The  conceptionalist  before  Kant,  from  Descartes 
down,  in  so  far  as  he  was  true  to  his  principle,  believed 
just  as  firmly  in  the  identity  of  reality  and  conception  as 
did  Berkeley  in  the  identity  of  reality  and  perception. 
The  result  was  that  things  were  thought  to  be  constituted 
of  organized  bundles  of  conceptions.  Consciousness  was 
now  creative  in  the  role  of  conception  rather  than  in  that 
of  perception ;  that  was  all  the  difference.  It  is  true  that  in 
conception  we  reach  the  notion  of  substance  and  persistent 
being.  But  what  we  ask  here  is,  whether  substance  and 
persistent  being  are  to  be  regarded  as  purely  notional  so 
that  they  have  no  other  existence  than  in  our  conceptions. 
If  this  were  true  it  ought  to  be  possible  for  us  to  deduce 
the  order  of  the  world  from  the  abstract  order  of  our  con- 
ceptions and  the  phenomena  of  the  world  from  the  content 
of  our  conceptions.  This  we  find  ourselves  wholly  unable 
to  do.  Not  only  so,  but  we  find  ourselves  wholly  unable 
to  conceive  how  such  a  world  could  be  possible.  If  we  take 
any  of  our  fundamental  conceptions,  that  of  cause,  substance 
or  ground,  for  example,  and  employ  it  in  a  real  way,  that  is, 


218  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

in  thinking  things,  rather  than  in  thinking  about  them,  we 
find  that  a  distinction  of  the  same  type  as  that  which  arose 
in  perception  comes  up  here  between  our  conceptual  process 
and  the  reality  whose  existence  is  thought.  We  think  the 
world  as  causally  determined  or  as  persisting  in  being.  But 
these  thoughts  are  perishable  and  must  lapse  in  our  own 
consciousness,  or  in  the  consciousness  of  any  being  of  our 
type.  "We  cannot  stand  forever  like  Atlas,  bearing  the 
world  on  our  shoulders.  But  when  we  let  go,  what  becomes 
of  it?  We  do  not  and  we  cannot,  think  the  world  as  ceas- 
ing to  be  causally  determined  when  we  or  other  beings  are 
not  thinking  under  the  causal  category.  If  such  were 
really  the  case  it  would  be  interesting  to  know  what 
transpires  at  the  north  pole  when  no  mind  is  regarding  it 
under  the  causal  category. 

The  truth  is,  that  throughout  the  whole  range  of  what 
we  may  call  its  cognitive  activity,  consciousness  is  not  con- 
stitutive of  the  real  existence  of  things.  The  esse  of  things 
is  neither  percipi  nor  concipi.  But  it  is  certainly  true  that 
percipi  and  concipi  are  constitutive  of  something,  and  we 
may  ask  here,  what  it  is  they  bring  into  existence  and 
how  this  creation  is  related  to  real  existence.  Let  us  first 
consider  perception.  When  I  perceive  the  tree  on  the 
campus,  what  is  immediately  present  to  my  mind  is  a  bunch 
of  perceptions  and  I  have  found  that  these  may  lapse  with- 
out rendering  my  object  non-existent.  If  my  perceptions 
are  not  the  object  perceived,  what  are  they?  The  only 
answer  I  can  give  here  is  that  they  somehow  represent  to 
me  an  object  which  I  conceive  to  exist  independently  of  my 
perceptions.  That  is,  the  real  object  has  an  extra-percep- 
tional existence.  Of  this  extra-perceptional  object  my  per- 
ceptions are  symbols,  and  I  mean  by  symbols  terms  which 
represent  as  effect  represents  underlying  cause,  but  not 
pictorially.  The  symbol  is  not,  or  at  least  need  not,  be  like 
the  existence  it  symbolizes.  What,  then,  does  my  percep- 
tion-object symbolize?  Here,  I  think,  we  come  upon  a 
factor  which  has  been  too  much  overlooked  in  epistemology. 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  219 

Until  consciousness  becomes  able  to  reflect,  the  symbol  will 
be  taken  for  the  reality.  It  is  to  the  reflective  conscious- 
ness the  perception-object  becomes  a  symbol.  How,  then, 
is  this  separation  of  symbol  from  reality  effected?  Mani- 
festly by  the  fact  that  we  conceive  the  object  as  exist- 
ing when  our  perceptions  have  lapsed.  In  the  middle  of 
the  night  I  recall  in  memory  an  image  of  the  tree  on  the 
campus  and  this  arouses  the  thought  of  its  existence  which 
is  simply  the  conceptual  affirmation  of  its  existence.  I 
think  the  tree  as  existing  when  my  perceptions  have  lapsed, 
or  at  least  when  they  have  ceased  to  be  perceptual  and  have 
become  reminiscent.  I  am  thus  led  to  distinguish  the 
percept-object  from  what  I  may  call  a  concept-object,  one 
that  continues  to  exist  after  my  perceptions  have  lapsed. 
The  point  I  wish  to  emphasize  here  is  the  fact  that  what 
the  percept-object  symbolizes  is  the  concept-object.  My 
perception  stands  as  a  symbol  of  objects  which  I  conceive 
as  continuing  to  exist  after  I  have  ceased  to  perceive  them. 
But  they  could  not  so  persist  in  existence  to  me  after  I  had 
distinguished  my  perceptions  from  them  as  their  perish- 
able symbols,  if  I  did  not  conceive  these  objects.  They 
must  exist  to  me  in  conception,  that  is,  I  must  think  them 
as  existing  before  I  can  have  grounds  for  distinguishing 
their  existence  from  their  perceptual  symbols.  It  is,  in 
short,  with  direct  reference  to  the  concept-object  of  thought 
that  the  percept-object  becomes  symbolic. 

The  concept-object  thus  becomes  an  important  term  in 
cognition.  Locke  anticipated  the  distinction  between  the 
concept-object  and  the  percept-object  when  he  made  his 
famous  partition  between  the  primary  and  secondary  quali- 
ties of  things.  The  secondary  qualities  are  simply  the 
percept-object,  the  bunch  of  perceptions  which  perishes  in 
the  using,  while  the  primary  qualities  are  the  concept- 
object,  the  object  conceived  as  existing  more  permanently 
and  fundamentally.  This  will  appear  more  clearly  if  we 
consider  what  qualities  Locke  regards  as  primary.  They 
are  extension,  figure  and  solidity.     Now,  figure  is  plainly 


220  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

not  a  primary  quality  in  the  same  sense  that  extension  and 
solidity  are  to  be  taken  as  primary.  Figure  is  a  determina- 
tion of  space  while  extension  is  of  its  essence.  Solidity  is 
also  a  simple  quality  by  virtue  of  which  a  thing  maintains 
itself  in  existence  against  whatever  would  suppress  it. 
Taking  extension  and  solidity,  then,  as  the  really  primary 
qualities  of  things,  it  is  obvious  that  these  belong  to  the 
concept-object  and  not  at  all  to  the  percept-object.  What 
we  perceive  is  the  object,  not  as  extended  but  as  large  or 
small,  as  filling  up  more  or  less  of  our  visual  or  tactual 
field.  Nor  do  we  perceive  the  object  as  solid,  but  rather 
as  resisting  our  pressure,  as  refusing  to  get  itself  out  of 
our  way.  Reflection  tells  us  that  what  fills  up  our  visual  per- 
spective is  extended,  and  that  an  existent  which  is  capable 
of  resisting  our  efforts  to  get  into  its  place,  is  solid.  The 
primary  qualities  belong,  therefore,  to  the  concept-object 
which  the  percept-object  symbolizes,  while  the  secondary 
are  qualities  of  the  percept-object.  Consequently  the  pri- 
mary qualities  seem  to  be,  and  are  in  fact,  more  funda- 
mental to  the  real  existence  of  the  object  than  are  the 
secondary. 

The  reason  for  this  will  shed  light  on  the  cognitive  rela- 
tion of  consciousness  to  existence.  The  object  of  concep- 
tion seems  to  be  more  fundamental  than  the  object  of 
perception  because  it  does,  in  fact,  lie  closer  to  the  heart 
of  reality.  We  have  found  the  heart  of  reality,  not  in  the 
cognitive  activity  which  has  a  presupposition,  but  rather  in 
that  central  agency  of  will  in  which  consciousness  goes 
out  in  a  concrete  effort  to  overcome  and  realize  the  world. 
It  is  in  this  effort-movement,  if  we  may  be  allowed  the 
phrase,  that  consciousness  fundamentally  asserts  itself  and 
expresses  its  reality.  The  cognitive  activity  arises,  as  we 
saw,  in  connection  with  this  more  fundamental  form  of 
agency  in  order  to  serve  as  its  guide  by  symbolizing  the 
existences  with  which  it  deals.  We  learned  in  a  former 
chapter  how  the  dog's  perceptions  of  the  tree  serve  to  guide 
his   deeper   agency   around   obstacles   by  which  it  would 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  221 

otherwise  be  thwarted.  Here  we  wish  to  point  to  the 
fact  that  it  is  the  experience  of  this  deeper  agency  which 
leads  the  reflecting  consciousness  to  develop  the  primary 
qualities  of  things.  Extension  and  solidity  come  to  stand 
specially  for  that  which  thwarts  opposing  agency.  Their 
immediate  spring  is  resistance,  the  sense  of  rebuff  which 
the  dog  experiences  as  well  as  the  man,  developed  by 
reflection  into  cognitive  forms.  These  become  symbols, 
therefore,  and  take  their  place  in  the  cognitive  world  in 
connection  with  other  symbols;  but  symbolizing  more 
directly  the  experience  of  the  deeper  agency,  they  take 
rank  in  the  cognitive  world  as  primary  rather  than  sec- 
ondary qualities. 

We  have  seen,  however,  that  both  the  secondary  and 
primary  qualities  take  their  place  as  symbols,— that  neither 
can  be  identified  with  the  real  existents  to  which  they 
refer.  Is  it  possible,  then,  for  us  to  say  anything  as  to  the 
nature  of  these  real  existents  which  our  cognitions  sym- 
bolize? We  deal  with  the  question  here  not  as  a  meta- 
physical issue,  but  as  a  central  problem  in  the  theory  of 
cognition.  The  whole  result  of  cognition  is  the  creation 
and  development  of  symbols,  while  the  esse  of  things  lies 
outside  of  both  percipi  and  concipi.  Berkeley  and  the 
rationalists  are  both  at  fault  in  mistaking  symbols  for 
things  symbolized.  What  can  I  say,  then,  if  the  tree  out 
on  the  campus  is  not  to  be  identified  with  either  my  per- 
ceptions or  my  conceptions?  One  resource  is  to  regard  it 
as  a  thing  in  itself,  in  the  Kantian  sense,  and  as  therefore 
inaccessible  to  knowledge.  We  may  in  fact  reach  this  con- 
clusion about  it,  but  if  so  the  time  is  not  yet.  There  is  an 
important  clue  which  we  must  follow  up  before  we  shall  be 
ready  to  give  up  in  despair.  We  have  seen  how  the  sec- 
ondary and  primary  qualities  of  the  tree  have  developed 
as  symbols  of  an  existence  that  in  some  way  transcends 
them.  The  symbols  are  not  the  real  existent;  they  only 
represent  it  in  a  way  that  does  not  tell  us  what  the  real  is 
like.     But   they  designate   an   existent,   and  the  primary 


222  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

qualities  designate  it  more  fundamentally  than  the  sec- 
ondary. May  not  this  be  because  of  their  relation  to  that 
deeper  agency  which  operates  at  the  heart  of  consciousness  ? 
We  saw  how  the  dog  in  his  collision  realized  a  deeper 
experience  of  the  tree  in  connection  with  which  the  per- 
ceptive symbols  were  developed  and  acquired  a  meaning. 
These  symbols  enabled  the  dog  to  avoid  the  tree  in  subse- 
quent adventures  and  thus  to  escape  the  deeper  experience 
of  the  painful  frustration  of  his  efforts.  The  dog's  intelli- 
gence is  not  able  to  go  very  far,  perhaps,  in  interpreting 
its  experience,  but  let  us  substitute  a  human  intelligence 
that  is  capable  of  reflection.  Out  of  its  deeper  experience 
the  reflective  consciousness  will  develop  the  primary  sym- 
bols and  these  will  have  immediate  reference  to  its  deeper 
experience.  I  do  not  mean  that  they  will  directly  symbolize 
the  volitional  agency  of  consciousness  itself.  They  are 
rather  symbols  of  something  that  is  capable  of  painfully 
thwarting  its  agency  and  which  it  must  needs  respect. 
We  find  here  what  I  conceive  to  be  the  core  of  the  matter. 
The  cognitive  symbols  represent  a  real  existent  which  is 
nevertheless  not  identical  with  any  of  the  terms  of  the 
representation.  The  existent  can  truly  be  said  to  exist 
outside  of  its  representation,  for  what  we  mean  to  assert 
when  we  say  that  things  exist  which  our  cognitions  sym- 
bolize, is  that  there  exist  agencies  apart  from  the  agency 
of  our  own  consciousness  which  are  capable  of  painfully 
thwarting  our  efforts.  We  call  these  existents  agents 
because  we  cannot  conceive  agency  as  being  thwarted 
except  by  other  agency  like  it  in  some  sense,  thus  employ- 
ing the  analogy  of  our  own  consciousness  to  secure  the  first 
term  of  intelligibility.  My  cognitions  thus  symbolize  to 
me  the  real  existence  of  an  agency  not  my  own  which  is 
capable  of  painfully  thwarting  my  efforts.  When,  there- 
fore, I  say  that  the  tree  out  on  the  campus  has  an  existence 
which  my  cognitions  only  symbolize,  I  mean  that  what  I 
perceive  or  conceive  as  a  tree  is  a  real  agent,  that  it  exists 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  223 

as  an  energizing  something  that  is  capable  of  painfully 
thwarting  the  efforts  of  my  own  energy. 

A  brief  answer  to  a  metaphysical  question  will  complete 
this  part  of  our  discussion.  If  the  real  existence  of  things 
in  general,  is  thus  found  to  consist  in  their  exercising  an 
agency  apart  from  the  agency  of  the  consciousness  in  which 
they  are  cognized,  can  we  say  anything  determinate  as  to 
the  nature  of  these  things?  Our  cognitions  symbolize  them 
but  do  not  constitute  their  real  existence.  Their  real 
existence  consists  in  their  agency.  Can  we  say  anything 
further  regarding  their  nature?  There  are  just  two  alter- 
natives open.  We  may  apply  to  them  the  analogy  of  our 
conscious  agency  and  by  its  critical  use  develop  some 
definite  concepts  under  which  the  nature  of  things  may  be 
to  some  degree  determined;  or,  we  may  deny  the  validity 
of  this  use  of  analogy.  The  alternative,  then,  will  be  to 
leave  the  nature  of  objective  existence  wholly  unde- 
termined. Our  cognitions  would  then  symbolize  to  us 
existents  whose  real  nature  must  forever  remain  completely 
unknown.  So  much  metaphysics  seems  to  be  necessary 
in  order  to  determine  the  connection  of  our  theory  of  cog- 
nition with  the  problem  of  the  ultimate  nature  of  things. 
The  analogy  of  the  deeper  experience  of  consciousness  is 
the  only  guide  we  have  to  metaphysical  conclusions. 

Having  determined  as  far  as  is  possible  at  this  stage  of 
the  discussion,  the  relation  of  cognition  to  the  existence  of 
that  which  is  cognized,  we  now  take  up  the  question  of  the 
method  by  which  consciousness  realizes  the  world,  both  in 
the  sphere  of  cognition  and  in  the  field  of  its  deeper  agency. 
Our  first  problem,  then,  is  that  of  the  method  of  cognition. 
We  are  aiming  to  deal  with  essentials  here  and  shall  omit 
details  as  much  as  possible.  When  we  speak  of  the  method 
of  cognition  the  plain  man  naturally  thinks  of  perception 
and  has  a  vision  of  the  object  as  rising  up  immediately 
before  him.  Now,  the  immediacy  of  the  perceptions  can- 
not be  denied.  If  the  brain-physiologist  says  to  the  plain 
You  have  missed  altogether  the  brain-process  which 


224  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

must  be  gone  through  before  your  perception  becomes 
possible,"  and  if  the  chorus  be  swelled  by  the  physicist 
who  says,  "You  have  also  missed  the  physical  process  by 
means  of  which  the  stimulations  of  the  environment  have 
been  conveyed  to  your  organism";  it  is  open  to  the  plain 
man  to  reply,  "None  of  these  things  have  I  perceived  at 
all.  What  is  immediately  present  to  me  is  my  percep- 
tions. They  are  there.  I  know  not  how  they  came  to  be 
there. ' '  The  plain  man 's  word  must  be  taken  on  the  ques- 
tion of  fact.  It  is  only  when  he  begins  to  theorize  that  he 
becomes  unreliable.  It  would  seem  as  though  the  experts 
and  the  plain  man  had  missed  each  other's  points  of  view 
and  the  reason  is  clear  enough.  They  were  thinking  of  two 
different  orders  of  facts.  The  plain  man's  facts  are  what 
consciousness  knows  when  it  perceives  its  object.  The  facts 
of  the  expert  are  not  known  to  the  consciousness  that  per- 
ceives its  object,  but  to  an  observing  consciousness  that  has 
been  investigating  the  conditions  of  the  perceiving  con- 
sciousness 's  activity.  What  the  plain  man  says  is  "I  see 
my  object  immediately";  and  he  is  right.  What  the  ex- 
perts say  is,  "We  have  discovered  certain  processes  in  the 
physical  world  and  in  your  nervous  system  which  must  take 
place  before  your  perception  is  possible,"  and  they,  too, 
are  right.  The  perception  of  the  plain  man  is  a  phe- 
nomenon that  is  immediately  related  to  his  own  conscious- 
ness. Of  this  he  is  sure  so  that  he  seems  to  have  an 
immediate  cognitive  relation  with  the  existent  object  it- 
self. But  in  this  part  of  his  experience  he  is  deceived. 
The  immediacy  is  all  in  his  relation  to  his  perceptions. 
There  may  be  a  thousand  steps  between  him  and  the  exist- 
ent object;  the  physicist  and  the  physiologist  have  shown 
that  there  are  many.  The  tree  out  on  the  campus,  which 
I  seem  to  behold  with  such  immediacy,  is  in  reality  very 
remote.  The  movements  of  light  or  sound  must  pass 
through  a  medium  involving  many  vibrations  before  they 
reach  the  outer  end  of  a  nerve  of  sight  or  hearing.  They 
must   then   travel   as   nerve-vibrations   over   a   number   of 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  225 

tracks,  making  the  necessary  changes  at  all  the  nerve- 
centers  until  they  come  to  the  nerve  centers  directly  con- 
nected with  perception;  these  become  active  and  perception 
arises  in  connection  with  this  last  act. 

If,  now,  we  say  that  the  real  world  consists  of  two 
existents,  my  own  consciousness  and  the  tree  which  I  per- 
ceive, these  will  constitute  the  really  co-ordinate  terms  in 
my  world.  It  is  primarily  a  world  of  existents,  and  every- 
thing else  will  be  reducible  to  the  relations  among  these 
existents.  The  transaction  that  has  just  taken  place  be- 
tween my  consciousness  and  the  tree  is  called  perception 
and  it  is  a  transaction  that  involves  some  communication 
between  my  consciousness  and  the  existent  which  I  call 
the  tree.  The  plain  man  thought  that  relation  to  be 
immediate  and  one-sided, — that  I  just  looked  out  and  saw 
the  tree  while  the  tree  did  nothing.  The  facts  of  the  ex- 
pert show  us,  however,  that  the  tree  has  an  important 
part  to  perform.  It  must  in  the  first  place  be  an  energiz- 
ing thing  and  not  the  mere  motionless  mass  it  seems. 
Then  it  must  set  in  motion  vibrations  of  light  or  sound 
which  are  taken  up  and  transmitted  by  the  nerves  to  the 
point  where  my  consciousness  is  affected  by  their  stimulus. 
From  this  point  of  view  it  would  seem  as  though  the 
other  existent  did  pretty  much  everything  and  that  my 
consciousness  were  passive.  This,  however,  is  not  the  full 
ease.  The  plain  man  has  overlooked  some  facts  in  con- 
sciousness which  now  require  to  be  stated.  The  great  fact 
is  the  initial  act  of  attention  which  attests  the  activity  of 
consciousness.  Then,  again,  there  is  the  process  of  rein- 
statement by  virtue  of  which  a  single  light -stimulus 
enables  the  mind  to  bring  up  and  put  together  a  whole 
representation  including  many  perceptual  elements. 

It  would  seem,  then,  that  my  perception  is  the  result 
of  concurrent  activities  and  that  it  has  a  double  history 
behind  it.  But  I  wish  to  know  more  about  it.  The  per- 
ception itself,  howT  is  it  related  to  the  processes  just  pointed 
to  and  how  is  it  related  to  the  existents  which  are  concerned 

15 


226  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

in  its  rise?  To  the  processes  it  is  manifestly  related  in 
different  ways.  It  is  the  direct  product  of  the  conscious 
activity  while  it  has  been  only  indirectly  stimulated  by  the 
activity  outside  of  consciousness.  That  this  is  true  will 
appear  if  we  place  an  infant  and  an  adult  in  the  same 
relation  to  the  tree.  The  adult's  perception  will  be  the 
developed  symbol  of  a  tree,  while  that  of  the  child  will  be 
simply  an  indefinite  blur  with  no  special  characteristics. 
But  the  objective  stimulus  is  the  same.  Something  must 
be  allowed,  of  course,  for  the  undeveloped  condition  of 
the  nervous  system  of  the  child.  But  the  main  difference 
arises  in  consciousness.  Perception  arises  as  an  act  of 
attention  upon  a  present  stimulus,  but  this  is  only  its  initial 
character.  It  is  for  the  most  part  a  summation  of  expe- 
riences for  which  the  objective  stimulus  has  in  a  sense  only 
supplied  the  signal.  The  child  and  the  adult  receive  the 
same  signal,  substantially,  but  it  signifies  a  thousand  times 
more  to  the  adult  because  he  has  had  a  thousandfold  more 
experience  than  the  child.  We  may  say,  then,  that  per- 
ception in  view  of  the  processes  to  which  it  is  related  is 
simply  the  interpretation  of  signals  from  the  world  of  ex- 
istence, in  terms  of  the  symools  of  a  collective  experience. 
The  perception  as  a  whole  is  not  produced  or  directly  caused 
in  any  sense  by  the  objective  factors.  It  is  directly  produced 
by  consciousness  itself,  though  in  the  production  conscious- 
ness has  received  a  stimulus  or  signal  from  without  which 
has  served  as  the  occasion  of  the  interpretative  process. 
When  we  study  the  process  of  perception  as  it  actually  arises 
and  unfolds,  we  are  impressed  with  the  extremely  mechan- 
ical and  artificial  character  of  the  ordinary  representations. 
If  we  were  to  rely  on  the  judgment  of  the  experts  who 
approach  it  from  the  purely  physical  standpoint  Ave  would 
be  led  to  the  conclusion  that  consciousness  has  very  little 
to  do  in  the  matter  except  to  register  in  a  passive  way  the 
results  of  brain  transactions  or  transactions  of  the  purely 
physical  forces.  On  the  other  hand,  the  'conscious'  expert 
who  has  been  accustomed  to  a  too  exclusive  use  of  intro- 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  227 

spection  may  find  himself  thrown  into  a  state  of  panic  by 
the  monopolizing  aspect  of  the  physical  claims.  It  is  only, 
however,  when  the  whole  transaction  is  viewed  on  both  its 
sides  that  it  becomes  apparent  that  the  outside  processes 
simply  convey  a  hint  to  consciousness  and  that  the  whole 
business  of  organizing  the  perception-symbol  is  practically 
a  function  of  consciousness. 

What,  then,  is  the  relation  of  the  concept-elements  in 
cognition  to  those  of  perception  ?  This  will  be  the  easier  to 
determine  in  view  of  the  conclusion  we  have  reached  as  to 
perception.  We  have  found  that  perception  is  an  activity 
of  consciousness  which  derives  its  occasion  from  a  signal 
given  by  the  existent  outside  of  consciousness.  This  signal 
comes  in  the  shape  of  a  stimulus  and  is  resolvable  into 
certain  wave-movements  or  vibrations  which  are  traceable  to 
this  external  existent  as  their  source.  What  the  transaction 
is  in  which  consciousness  first  becomes  cognizant  of  the 
stimulus,  it  is  not  given  us  to  fathom.  But  we  know  the 
fact;  the  stimulus  is  apprehended  as  a  signal  and  the  per- 
ception-process is  the  interpretation  of  the  signal,  the 
organization  of  a  symbol  which  will  serve  as  a  guide  to  con- 
duct with  reference  to  that  particular  existent.  Now  con- 
ception as  a  factor  in  cognition  is  a  further  extension  as 
well  as  a  transformation  of  the  perception-process.  Con- 
ception cannot  be  said  to  give  us  in  any  sense  a  first-hand 
construction  of  the  world  of  stimulation.  It  presupposes 
the  perception-object  and  it  plays  directly  on  this  object. 
The  stimulus  of  conception  is  the  perception-object,  not  the 
original  signal  on  which  perception  operates.  Primarily, 
conception  is  an  operation  on  perception.  And  in  its 
meaning  it  is  a  further  development  of  the  symbolizing 
process  which  we  call  cognition.  Perception  gives  us  a 
world  of  things  immediately  qualified  by  our  perceptions 
(for  we  have  seen  that  the  meaning  of  perception  as  a  sym- 
bol does  not  arise  to  perception  itself)  through  which  they 
are  represented  as  having  a  certain  content  of  coloration, 
sonancy,  roughness  or  smoothness,  hardness  or  yieldingness, 


228  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

coldness  or  warmness,  sweetness  or  bitterness,  agreeable 
or  disagreeable  smell,  and  so  on.  And  they  present  them- 
selves in  certain  more  formal  qualities  as  bulkiness  by 
which  they  fill  up  our  perspective  more  or  less,  and  another 
quality  by  virtue  of  which  they  rebuff  us  when  we  attempt 
to  ignore  their  existence ;  together  with  a  third  quality  by 
virtue  of  which  they  abide  through  a  series  of  perishable 
perceptions. 

It  is  in  these  more  formal  elements  of  perception  that 
conception  finds  its  points  of  departure.  This  is  a  topic 
of  some  importance  inasmuch  as  it  is  a  denial  that  con- 
ceptual progress  is  primarily  a  matter  of  generalizing  what 
Locke  calls  the  secondary  qualities.  If  it  were  this  pri- 
marily, it  would  never  reach  the  universal  in  cognition. 
But  we  know  the  universal  is  reached  as  a  matter  of  fact. 
Science  rests  on  principles  which  not  simply  may  be,  but 
will  be,  true  throughout  the  world  with  which  science  deals. 
But  we  find  that  science  can  never  go  over  the  whole  ground 
by  observation  to  see  whether  its  judgments  are  actually 
so  or  not.  The  truth  of  the  matter  is  that  observation  does 
not  work  in  the  sphere  of  the  real  universal.  The  uni- 
versal has  a  history,  but  it  is  not  one  of  observation.  It  is 
a  history  of  conceptual  rather  than  perceptual  activity. 
Conception  first  extends  the  world  of  cognition;  then  it 
h-ansforms  the  whole.  Here  we  are  asking  about  the  first 
function.  In  the  first  place,  conception  acts  by  taking  a 
new  start.  We  take  a  run  in  perception,  then  we  draw 
back,  as  it  were,  to  take  breath,  and  in  conception  cogni- 
tion is  just  getting  its  second  wind  and  coming  down  to 
steady  work.  In  doing  so  it  seizes,  instinctively  no  doubt, 
on  the  germs  of  the  primary  qualities  which  perception  does 
not  distinguish  from  the  secondary.  It  develops  the  percept 
of  bulkiness  into  extension.  The  percept  of  resistance  is 
developed  into  solidity,  which  involves  both  reactive  and 
persistive  quality,  the  former  supplying  the  norm  of  causa- 
tion, which  we  have  found  to  mean  active,  effective  agency. 
Solidity  in  this  aspect  is  a  symbol  of  that  active  energy  by 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  229 

virtue  of  which  causal  effects  are  produced  in  ourselves  or 
other  agents  with  which  we  collide.  Out  of  the  persistive 
quality  of  solidity,  on  the  other  hand,  combined  with  our 
experience  of  the  ability  of  things  to  survive  our  perishable 
perceptions,  the  norm  of  substance  develops.  A  thing 
comes  to  possess  substantiality  mainly  through  its  power  to 
hold  the  fort  of  its  being  and  its  activity  against  all  comers. 
Lastly,  out  of  the  persistence  of  things  through  a  series 
of  perishable  perceptions  emerges  the  norm  of  time-succes- 
sion, which  is  the  lorm  in  and  through  which  a  plurality 
of  changes  maintains  its  connection  with  one  center  of 
existence. 

We  have  gone  far  enough  along  this  line  to  indicate  the 
way  in  which  conception  develops  the  primary  norms  which 
are  supplied  in  perception.  It  is  the  same  world  of  existents 
with  which  both  perception  and  conception  are  concerned. 
But  conception  extends  as  well  as  transforms  the  world  of 
perception.  It  extends  it,  as  we  have  seen,  by  developing  the 
norms  of  primary  quality  found  in  perception.  The  develop- 
ment-process in  conception  is,  however,  sui  generis.  It  pro- 
ceeds, not  by  filling  its  net  with  mere  particulars,  but  by 
reflectively  developing  the  implicit  character  of  the  percep- 
tive norms  until  their  true  significance  is  revealed.  This 
significance  of  the  norm  consists  in  the  fact  that  it  is  a  true 
universal;  that  it  is  one  of  those  forms  which  testify  to 
their  own  universality  in  the  world  of  cognition.  Now, 
what  do  we  mean  by  the  term  universality  as  applied  to  an 
element  in  cognition  ?  What  else  but  the  fact  that  in  what 
we  call  universal  we  have  found  a  way  of  thinking  about 
things  that  is  co-extensive  with  the  world  to  which  the 
secondary  qualities  belong  and  which  they  characterize? 
The  primary  qualities  are,  in  short,  the  systemic  features 
of  this  world,  and  it  is  this  systemic  character  which  con- 
ception develops  in  the  form  of  universality.  The  primary 
qualities  are  universal  because  they  are  systemic,  and 
they  are  also  necessary  for  the  same  reason.  Only,  here  we 
approach    the    systemic    principle    on    its    negative    side, 


230  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

where  it  becomes  apparent  that  if  it  be  called  in  question 
the  world  of  secondary  qualities  loses  its  foundations. 

The  concept-activity  thus  extends  the  world  of  percep- 
tion by  connecting  it  with  certain  principles  or  forms 
which  organize  its  parts  and  elements  into  a  system  and 
thus  complete  it.  But  conception  also  transforms  its  world. 
The  main  step  in  the  transformation  is,  of  course,  the 
change  that  is  wrought  by  the  development  of  norms  of 
universality.  This  by  itself,  however,  would  be  an  abstrac- 
tion, and  we  have  seen  that  what  conception  works  on 
immediately  is  the  world  of  perception.  We  saw  how  per- 
ception develops  its  symbols  through  the  various  senses. 
It  is  difficult,  however,  to  see  how  the  world  of  secondary 
qualities  could  become  anything  more  than  a  dog's  world, 
without  the  process  of  reflection.  The  dog  regards  the 
symbols  as  the  things  themselves.  At  least  he  does  not 
distinguish  them  from  what  they  represent.  But  science 
begins  with  this  distinction.  Its  phenomena  are  something 
more  than  they  appear  to  be  on  their  face.  This  something 
more  is  their  symbolic  character.  Science  distinguishes  its 
phenomenon  from  the  real  existent  which  it  symbolizes 
and  it  is  regarded  as  an  appearance  or  manifestation  of 
a  nature  which  underlies  it  and  does  not  itself  appear.  All 
this  is  too  erudite  for  the  dog.  The  most  intelligent  dog 
could  not  become  a  scientist!  But  science,  which  is  the 
organ  of  reflection,  here  makes  an  apparent  diremption  of 
the  phenomenal  from  the  real,  only  in  the  end  to  heal  the 
breach  by  restoring  the  phenomenal  to  its  place  in  the 
world  of  cognition  as  the  symbol  of  a  world  of  existents, 
that  is,  of  underlying  reality  with  which  it  is  connected 
dynamically  as  an  effect  to  its  cause.  The  whole  sphere  of 
cognition  thus  becomes  transformed.  The  secondary  quali- 
ties become  real  phenomena  instead  of  quasi  things  in 
themselves.  The  generalization  of  these  leads  science  up  to 
a  point  where  the  primary  qualities  become  necessary  in 
order  to  complete  and  rationalize  the  cognitive  world.  For 
we  have  been  at  pains  to  show  in  former  chapters  that  the 


chap. -iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  231 

mere  generalization  of  phenomena  constitutes  but  the  pre- 
liminary work  of  science.  The  profounder  and  more 
characteristic  task  of  science  is  the  translation  of  its  gen- 
eralizations into  laws  by  means  of  their  connection  through 
causation  with  a  deeper  world  of  reality.  And  the  doc- 
trine we  are  seeking  to  maintain  here  is  that  it  is  only  by 
the  mediation  of  the  primary  qualities  that  this  translation 
can  be  effected.  If  there  were  none  but  secondary  quali- 
ties, it  is  difficult  to  see  how  the  transition  from  the  dog's 
world  could  ever  be  made.  But  the  primary  qualities  as 
they  manifest  themselves  in  perception  supply  norms  to 
reflection  by  means  of  which  the  distinction  between  sym- 
bol and  underlying  nature,  on  which  science  rests,  is 
achieved  and  by  which  also  the  whole  field  of  phenomena 
is  rationalized  and  completed. 

We  have  seen  how  the  two  activities  of  perception  and 
conception  are  necessary  in  order  to  complete  the  world  of 
cognition.  But  the  whole  of  cognition  is  a  symbolizing 
process,  and  what  it  symbolizes  is  some  world  of  existents 
deeper  and  more  fundamental  than  itself.  We  have  then 
come  up  to  the  question  of  the  connection  of  cognition  with 
the  world  cognized;  and  by  cognized  we  now  mean  symbol- 
ized. In  the  order  of  the  development  of  cognition  itself 
it  is  clear  that  perception  lies  nearer  than  conception  to 
its  object;  the  first  signal  from  the  object  is  taken  up  and 
developed  by  perception,  while  conception  develops  from 
certain  points  in  the  perceptual  symbol  itself.  Between 
the  existent  object  which  I  call  tree  and  my  perceptions 
only  three  links  can  be  traced:  the  extra-organic  wave- 
movements,  the  intra-organic  wave-movements,  and  the 
mysterious  rise  of  the  signal  in  consciousness;  whereas, 
between  the  object  and  conceptions  there  areall  these,  plus 
perception  itself.  It  is  this  that  has  led  the  empirical 
philosophers  generally  to  ascribe  more  reality-value,  at 
least  more  existence-value,  to  perception  than  to  conception, 
and  one  whole  part  of  our  analysis  here  seems  to  bear  in 
the  same  direction.     But  the  force  of  this  is  overborne,  I 


232  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

think,  by  the  fact  that  the  empirical  philosopher  himself, 
in  order  to  escape  from  the  dog's  world  to  the  world  of 
science,  is  compelled  to  reverse  his  presuppositions  and  to 
assume  the  greater  reality-value  of  his  conceptions.  The 
fact  is,  that  in  ranking  perception  as  a  link  in  the  chain, 
we  have  temporarily  forgotten  that  it  does  not  belong  to 
the  same  order  as  the  extra  and  intra-organic  wave-move- 
ments. The  perception  including  the  conscious  signal  is 
a  symbol  developed  by  consciousness,  which  stands,  not  for 
the  wave-movements  of  either  species,  but  for  the  existent 
in  which  these  have  their  rise.  The  symbol  has  no  meaning 
for  these  wave-movements;  it  does  not  represent  them  in 
any  wray,  and  when  their  qualities  are  gotten  at  by  some 
process  of  scientific  analysis  they  are  found  to  be  wholly 
different  from  the  symbols  to  which  they  give  rise. 

Let  us  bear  this  in  mind,  then,  that  perception  sym- 
bolizes the  existent  rather  than  the  process  by  which  it  is 
stimulated.  On  the  side  of  consciousness  we  have  seen 
that  perception  arises  as  a  conscious  interpretation  of  a 
signal  which  appears  in  the  form  of  an  original  conscious 
awareness  of  a  stimulation.  There  is  no  ascertainable 
reason  in  the  signal  why  it  should  be  interpreted  in  one  way 
rather  than  in  another.  The  infant  without  experience  at 
all  will  not  interpret  it  at  all,  although  its  attention  will 
indicate  a  rudimentary  impulse  in  that  direction.  The 
common  element  in  all  cases  is  the  act  of  attention,  which 
is  an  act  of  will  rather  than  a  cognitive  act  proper,  but  one 
that  underlies  all  cognition.  A  will-act,  as  we  have  found, 
is  an  embodiment  of  the  central  and  fundamental  agency 
of  consciousness  which  devotes  its  efforts  to  realization  and 
to  which  the  whole  process  of  cognition  is  related,  in  the 
first  instance,  as  an  instrument.  The  symbolization  of 
things  is  found  in  various  ways  to  facilitate  and  make 
possible  the  greater  extension  and  satisfaction  of  the  prac- 
tical energies.  Perception  as  a  whole,  then,  is,  on  its 
objective  side  an  immediate  symbol  of  objective  existence, 
while  on  its  conscious  side  it  springs  mediately  out  of  an 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  233 

act  of  volition.  I  have  said  mediately,  because  the  atten- 
tion acts  immediately  on  the  signal  while  the  percept- 
symbol  seems  to  be  developed  by  activities  which  have  been 
liberated  in  consciousness  by  this  act  of  attention.  The 
percept-symbol  is  then  a  mediate  result  of  an  act  of  will. 

When  we  turn  to  conception,  however,  we  find  that  the 
phenomenon  presented  is  not  the  momentary  acting  of  will 
which  liberates  an  extra- volitional  movement,  but  rather  the 
l><  rsistence  of  the  ivill-act  itself.  This  is  the  peculiar  quality 
of  conception,  that  it  is  immediately  related  to  the  will. 
In  conception  the  will  takes  possession  of  the  conscious 
machinery  and  uses  it  as  its  hand-instrument  in  the  pro- 
duction of  its  results.  Thus  the  whole  result  of  concep- 
tion, its  extension  and  transformation  of  the  dog's  world 
into  the  world  of  science,  is  related  immediately  to  will  and 
to  volitional  agency.  In  conception  the  relations  of  the 
symbol  are  transformed  and  cognition  now  represents  only 
mediately  the  objective  existent,  while  on  its  subjective  side 
it  is  an  immediate  function  of  the  activity  of  will.  Here 
again  we  seem  to  be  joining  hands  with  subjective  idealism 
which  translates  our  cognitions  into  mere  ideas  of  our 
minds.  But  the  case  is  different  with  us.  We  have  con- 
nected the  cognition  immediately  with  will,  it  is  true,  but 
this  has  not  broken  its  mediate  connection  with  objective 
existence.  Berkeley  was  compelled  to  cut  his  perceptions 
loose  from  all  objective  reference  in  order  to  make  good  his 
position,  but  we  insist  on  these  connections  as  cardinal  to 
our  theory.  Schopenhauer  also  was  forced  to  practically 
the  same  measure  in  order  to  maintain  the  primacy  of  will 
and  the  volitional  activity.  Now,  we  are  concerned  here 
to  maintain  the  primacy  of  will,  but  are  not  willing  to  pay 
Berkeley's  or  Schopenhauer's  price.  If  we  take  cognition 
in  its  dual  character  as  a  synthesis  of  perception  and  con- 
ception, we  shall  find  its  product,  so  far  forth  as  perceptual, 
directly  related  to  the  objective  existent,— the  tree  in  the 
case  of  the  illustration, — while  so  far  forth  as  it  is  con- 
ceptual it  is  immediately  related  to  the  activity  of  will. 


234  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

Is  there  not  something  suggestive  in  this?  Let  us  travel 
the  road  again  from  the  real  object  which  my  cognition 
locates  out  in  the  campus  and  let  us  be  on  the  alert  that 
nothing  essential  escapes  us.  We  have  the  extra-organic 
wave-movement  giving  rise  to  an  intra-organic  wave-move- 
ment, and  this  leading  up  to  the  first  term  in  consciousness, 
the  signal  from  which  everything  develops.  We  have 
traced  the  perception  directly  from  this  signal.  But  there 
is,  in  fact,  a  deflection  here.  What  the  signal  appeals  to 
directly  is  the  will  which  responds  in  its  momentary  act 
of  attention,  an  act  which,  of  course,  may  repeat  itself  a 
great  number  of  times.  It  is  this  act  of  attention  that 
liberates  the  perceptive  energies.  But  we  have  also  learned 
that  the  conception-activity  is  an  immediate  result  of  the 
persistent  movement  of  will  in  reflection.  What  we  have 
not  as  yet  noticed  is  the  connection  between  the  momentary 
activity  of  will  in  perception  and  its  persistent  activity  in 
reflection.  If  we  observe  the  process  of  reflection  closely  we 
shall  find  that  it  always  follows  on  something  that  is  present 
to  the  mind  in  some  other  form  than  that  of  reflection. 
The  idea  of  God  presents  itself,  and  this  starts  a  process 
of  reflection.  Now,  in  cognition  it  is  clearly  some  product 
of  perception  that  stimulates  the  conceptual  activity.  We 
are  ready  then  for  the  last  step  in  our  analysis.  The 
signal  stimulates  directly  the  will  which  acts  in  attention 
and  liberates  the  perceptive-activities;  these  act  in  turn 
and  develop  the  percept-object  which  again  reacts  upon 
will  as  a  more  elaborate  signal  and  calls  forth  the  persistent 
effort  of  will  which  we  call  continued  attention  or  reflec- 
tion. The  liberation  of  the  conceptual-activity  is  the 
result,  and  the  outcome  is  the  completion  of  the  cognitive 
process. 

In  view  of  the  situation  as  thus  treated,  are  we  not 
justified  in  concluding  that  cognition  cannot  be  regarded 
simply  as  a  link  in  a  chain  which  connects  it  with  the 
objective  existent  on  the  one  hand  and  the  will-activity  in 
consciousness  on  the  other  ?     It  bears,  rather,  a  unique  char- 


chap.  iv.  CONSCIOUS  ACTIVITY.  235 

acter.  It  is  a  symbol  which  stands  between  and  represents 
two  worlds.  The  original  point  of  vital  contact  is  the 
signal  which  is  the  first  conscious  awareness  of  the  stimu- 
lation. But  at  this  point  it  is  important  that  we  should 
distinguish  the  fundamental  relation  from  that  which  is 
less  fundamental.  The  course  of  direct  influence  is  to  be 
traced  directly  from  the  existent  object  to  the  signal,  and 
from  the  signal  to  the  will.  The  will  asserts  itself  in  the 
act  of  attention  which  liberates  perception,  and  through 
the  perception-signal  is  roused  into  a  further  and  persistent 
activity  which  takes  the  form  of  reflection.  Let  us  suppose, 
now,  that  the  tree  turns  out  to  be  an  apple  tree  of  which  the 
fruit  is  ripe.  The  cognitive  activity  which  has  completed 
the  symbol  will  then  induce  a  further  activity  of  will  termi- 
nating on  the  original  source  of  the  stimulus  and  taking  the 
form  of  plucking  and  eating  the  fruit.  We  have  supposed 
the  cycle  to  thus  complete  itself  in  order  to  make  clear  that 
the  fundamental  transaction  takes  the  form  of  an  interplay 
of  energies  between  two  existents,  one  of  which  at  least  is 
conscious,  and  that  the  cognition  involved  in  this  interplay 
develops  as  a  symbol,  the  function  of  which  is  the  mediation 
of  the  two  species  of  agency  involved.  In  has  been  claimed 
from  the  beginning  that  the  cognitive  activity  is  conditioned 
by  a  more  fundamental  agency  of  will,  and  it  has  been  de- 
nied from  the  beginning  that  cognition  and  its  object  can  be 
completely  identified.  The  justification  of  this  has  now 
been  brought  forward  in  the  discovery  we  have  made  that 
cognition  is  a  mediating  symbolizing  process  through  which 
the  agencies  of  the  underlying  world  of  reality  are  enabled 
to  interact  and  through  the  development  of  which  they  are 
enabled  to  extend  the  sphere  of  their  interactions. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL. 

The  preceding  chapter  has  brought  us  up  to  the  problem  of 
the  two  species  of  activity,  that  of  consciousness  and  that  of 
the  physical  world.  The  fact  as  it  presents  itself  and  as 
the  plain  man  apprehends  it,  is  one  of  two  existents  of 
different  species  in  interaction,  so  that  each  can  initiate 
processes  that  are  completed,  or  at  least  continued,  in  the 
other.  This  will  be  apparent  if  we  complete  the  cyclical 
transaction  between  consciousness  and  the  tree.  The  tree 
initiates  processes  which  lead  to  my  cognition  of  it.  But 
in  turn,  stimulated  by  the  cognition,  my  will  may  initiate 
processes  which  lead  to  reactionary  measures  upon  the  tree, 
—plucking  and  eating  its  fruit  or  cutting  it  down  for  fuel. 
What  the  plain  man  realizes  is  the  practical  continuity  of 
the  two  worlds  and  the  ability  of  one  to  institute  processes 
and  produce  effects  in  the  other.  Now  we  have  seen  that 
the  plain  man  is  to  be  relied  on  for  the  fact  itself,  but  not 
for  the  interpretation  of  the  fact.  What  cannot  be  denied 
is  that  the  solidarity  of  the  mental  and  the  physical  move- 
ments originating  in  either  the  physical  or  the  mental 
realm,  gives  rise  apparently  without  let  or  hindrance  to 
processes  in  the  other  realm.  There  is  this  free  interplay 
combined  with  the  fact  that  no  citizen  of  either  realm  ever 
crosses  the  boundary  lines  into  the  other.  The  transaction 
is  clearly  international,  the  process  becoming  physical  on 
one  side  of  the  dividing  line,  mental  on  the  other  side. 

236 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  237 

The  plain  man  interprets  the  relation  as  causal  without 
troubling  himself  about  inconsistencies.  But  science  does 
not  find  the  situation  so  easy.  There  is  the  poser  to  start 
with,  as  to  how  a  physical  movement  can  have  a  state  or  act 
of  consciousness  for  its  effect.  The  impossibility  of  mak- 
ing anything  out  of  a  supposition  of  this  kind  becomes 
clearer  the  longer  we  reflect.  It  was  the  hopelessness  of 
the  situation  that  caused  science  to  give  up  the  plain  man's 
solution.  Whatever  the  connection  may  be  it  cannot  be 
causal,  science  thinks,  and  if  not  causal  it  cannot  be  a 
relation  of  interaction  at  all.  Of  this  much  science  feels 
sure,  but  when  the  question  arises,  what  then  is  the  rela- 
tion, all  answers  seem  to  lead  into  a  morass.  Rather  than 
follow  in  this  line  we  have  decided  here  to  venture  a  fresh 
analysis  of  the  situation  animated  by  the  hope  that  some 
clue  to  a  more  rational  result  may  be  turned  up.  The 
analysis  of  the  preceding  chapter  led  up  to  one  result  which 
was,  to  say  the  least,  disheartening.  We  found  that  the 
nexus  between  the  nerve-movement  and  the  signal  in  con- 
sciousness, by  which  we  mean  the  first  sensation  that  arises 
in  connection  with  the  stimulation,  was  one  that  could  not 
be  construed.  In  other  words,  how  a  physical  movement  or 
transaction  can  produce  an  effect  in  consciousness  is 
unthinkable.  The  suggestion  we  have  to  offer  here  is  that 
perhaps  the  trouble  is  self-made.  We  spoke  of  the  cog- 
nition as  a  symbol  which  stood  in  different  senses  for  two 
existents,  the  object  which  we  call  the  tree  and  the  voli- 
tional activity  of  consciousness.  We  then  connected  the 
objective  existent  with  consciousness  through  certain  wave- 
movements,  extra-  and  intra-organic,  and  the  supposition 
was  that  the  point  of  meeting  of  the  two  existents  was  a 
transaction  between  consciousness  and  these  wave-move- 
ments. But  we  are  ready  here  to  abjure  this  supposition, 
for  when  we  consider  the  wave-movements  we  find  that  we 
only  become  aware  of  them  through  cognition.  We  have 
no  immediate  realization  of  them  as  we  have  of  conscious 
activity,    but    making    the    objective    stimulations    which 


238  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

arouse  our  conscious  activities  an  object  of  investigation 
we  develop  a  cognitive  symbol  of  them  in  our  representa- 
tion of  them  as  wave-movements.  The  wave-movement  is 
thus  symbolic  like  all  other  cognition,  and  when  we  ask 
what  the  nature  of  that  which  is  symbolized  may  be,  no 
answer  is  forthcoming.  In  short,  the  real  nature  of  the 
stimulation  by  which  the  objective  existent  is  able  to  affect 
consciousness  is  not  revealed.  We  have  its  symbols  in  con- 
sciousness, according  to  which  it  is  represented  as  a  wave- 
movement,  just  as  we  have  the  symbol  of  the  tree  in 
consciousness  by  which  it  is  represented  as  colored,  ex- 
tended and  solid. 

Now  the  difficulty  of  science  has  arisen  mainly  from  the 
fact  that  the  symbolic  character  of  the  wave-movements 
has  been  ignored  and  these  have  been  treated  as  first-hand 
realities.  And  as  consciousness  is  a  first-hand  reality,  the 
transaction  has  been  conceived  as  one  between  the  wave- 
movements  and  consciousness,  whereas  now  we  know  that 
it  is  between  consciousness  and  what  the  wave-movements 
symbolize.  This  is  important,  for  when  we  ask  what  it  is 
these  wave-movements  symbolize  we  can  only  say  that 
it  is  some  kind  of  activity  of  the  objective  existent  we  call 
tree.  Moreover,  when  we  ask  what  kind  of  a  being  it  is 
Ave  call  tree,  we  can  only  say  that  we  have  the  symbol 
of  it  in  consciousness  but  that  this  does  not  reveal  its  inner 
nature.  We  do  not  know  the  inner  reality  of  the  tree  nor 
do  we  know  the  real  nature  of  its  way  of  making  itself  felt 
by  other  existents.  When  we  come  down  to  the  bottom- 
fact  there  is  only  one  kind  of  existent  which  we  do  know, 
and  that  is  consciousness;  there  is  only  one  way  of  pro- 
ducing effects  known  to  us,  and  that  is  by  the  activity  of 
our  own  will.  These  are  our  first-hand  realities,  our  own 
consciousness  and  its  volitional  activity  or  agency.  We 
have  seen  in  another  place  how  it  becomes  necessary  to 
admit  objective  existents  like  the  tree  on  the  campus.  But 
the  tree  is  held  inferentially,  not  immediately.  We  do  not 
anywhere  immediately  realize  its  existence  as  we  do  that  of 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  239 

consciousness.  But  it  is  symbolized  in  cognition  and  its 
activity  which  we  feel  immediately  only  in  sensation,  as 
stimulation,  is  symbolized  as  wave-movement.  What  it  is 
in  itself  we  cannot  say,  only  that  it  immediately  stimulates 
consciousness  in  sensation. 

It  is  a  mistake,  then,  to  imagine  that  the  real  terms  of 
relation  between  the  objective  existent  and  consciousness 
are  the  wave-movements  on  the  one  hand  and  the  volitional 
activities  of  consciousness  on  the  other.  The  volitional 
movements  are  first-hand  realities,  while  the  wave-move- 
ments are  only  symbols.  The  first-hand  reality  here  is  the 
activity  of  the  objective  existent  as  it  is  in  itself.  But 
this  is  hidden  from  us.  Let  us  call  it  the  symbolized. 
Then  the  true  statement  of  the  connection  will  be  that  the 
activity  of  the  objective  existent,  which  is  symbolized  as 
wave-movement,  arouses  consciousness  in  sensation  to  voli- 
tional activity,  one  of  the  products  of  which  is  the  develop- 
ment of  a  cognitive  symbol  of  the  existent  which  stands  as 
the  source  of  the  stimulation.  Thus  in  cognition  the 
activities  which  stimulate  consciousness  are  connected  with 
their  existent  sources  and  the  intercourse  of  the  real  world 
is  mediated.  But  the  transaction,  as  we  now  conceive  it, 
is  one  that  takes  place  between  a  conscious  activity  of 
which  we  know  both  the  consciousness  and  the  form  of  the 
activity,  on  the  one  side,  and,  on  the  other,  an  activity  the 
nature  of  which  we  do  not  know,  and  which  is  conceived  to 
be  the  function  of  an  existent  the  nature  of  which  we  do 
not  know.  The  situation  as  thus  developed  supplies  us 
with  two  genuine  metaphysical  problems,  (1)  that  of  the 
nature  of  these  unknown  terms  in  our  world,  so  far  as  this 
nature  can  be  rendered  intelligible,  (2)  the  question  of  the 
ultimate  connection  between  objective  existents  and  the 
form  of  existence  we  know  in  consciousness,  that  is,  the 
ultimate  relation  of  consciousness  to  the  world. 

These  metaphysical  questions  will  have  to  rest  for  the 
present,  however,  while  we  attempt  to  reach  some  conclusion 
regarding  the  connection  of  the  physical  and  mental  that 


240  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

will  serve  the  purposes  of  science.  In  dealing  with  this  con- 
nection between  the  physical  and  mental,  science  is  inter- 
ested in  two  forms  in  which  it  occurs.  (1)  The  general 
case  of  the  bond  between  the  objective  stimulus  and  the 
movement  in  consciousness  to  which  it  gives  rise.  This 
includes  also  the  reverse  process  of  a  consciously  initiated 
movement  which  is  connected  with  processes  in  the  physical 
world.  (2)  The  more  special  case  of  the  connection  be- 
tween the  brain-movements  and  consciousness  which  is 
involved  in  cognition.  The  general  case  represents  a 
physical  process  as  in  some  way  so  bound  up  with  a  con- 
scious process  that  the  latter  seems  to  carry  out  in  conscious- 
ness a  project  which  was  started  in  the  physical  world.  But 
for  science  the  radical  difference  between  the  physical  and 
mental  processes, — in  short,  the  unthinkability  of  their  con- 
nection,—leads  to  the  doctrine  of  a  parallelism  of  two  orders 
of  movements  which  never  intermix,  but  which  so  harmonize 
with  one  another  that  the  one  world  may  be  depended  on 
to  carry  out  projects  begun  in  the  other.  Thus  if  the  wave- 
movements  are  those  of  a  barking  dog,  the  sensation  in 
consciousness  and  the  ensuing  volitional  movements  may 
be  depended  on  for  an  adjustment  to  the  outer-situation 
in  the  world  of  consciousness.  Now  if  science  can  succeed 
in  separating  its  own  problem  here  from  the  metaphysical 
considerations  with  which  it  is  closely  connected,  a  solution 
will  no  longer  be  hopeless.  I  say  this  in  face  of  the  almost 
disheartening  disagreements  into  which  the  discussions  of 
parallelism  have  led.  The  problem  as  it  concerns  science 
involves  the  fact  as  well  as  the  scope  and  validity  of  this 
parallelism. 

The  question  of  fact  seems  to  have  been  pretty  well 
settled  in  the  affirmative,  while  the  extent  and  validity  of 
its  application  are  still  in  debate.  There  seems  to  exist  no 
sufficient  reason,  however,  for  doubting  that  parallelism 
expresses  a  true  law  of  correspondence  between  the  physical 
and  mental  in  the  typical  cases  of  volitional  activities  which 
begin  or  end  in  the  physical  world,  or  of  brain-movements 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  241 

and  their  corresponding  sensations.  Taking  the  first  of 
these  cases  we  may  ask  what  the  problem  of  science  is  in 
the  case  of  volition-movements  which  have  either  their 
antecedents  or  consequents  in  the  physical  world.  The 
classic  passage  in  the  discussion  of  this  case  is  that  of 
Hume,  who  denied  the  existence  of  any  efficiency  in  volition 
to  bring  about  physical  effects.  We  are  conscious  of  two 
things  only,  our  own  volition  and  the  raising  of  the  arm, 
but  not  of  any  relation  of  power  between  them.  Hume  is 
unanswerable  on  his  own  ground.  But  the  plain  man 
answers  that  it  is  not  the  perception  of  the  arm-moving 
which  he  consciously  connects  with  volition,  but  rather  the 
m<>vi>}(j  of  the  arm.  His  experience  would  be  stated  as 
follows:  "I  am  conscious  of  my  arm  moving  in  connection 
with  my  willing  to  move  it.  My  perception  of  the  move- 
ment is  a  different  experience."  It  is  evident,  however, 
that  neither  Hume  nor  the  plain  man  are  keeping  clear  of 
metaphysical  considerations.  Science  can  only  isolate  its 
problem  by  recognizing  the  distinction  between  symbol  and 
reality.  The  physical  movements  with  which  it  deals  are 
only  symbols  of  an  underlying  reality  that  does  not  reveal 
its  nature.  But  consciousness  is  not  a  symbol.  It  is  a 
real  nature,  and  its  movements  are  real,  not  symbolic. 
This  is  the  doctrine  of  consciousness  which  emerges  here 
as  the  outcome  of  all  the  preceding  investigation.  The 
correspondence  then  arises  between  physical  movements 
which  stand  as  symbols  of  existents  outside  of  conscious- 
ness, and  the  voluntary  acts  of  consciousness  which  sym- 
bolize nothing  but  are  identical  with  consciousness  itself. 
The  physical  movements  directly  symbolize  the  extra- 
conscious  activities.  The  question  of  science  is  whether 
these  may  be  taken  also  as  indirectly  but  reliably  sym- 
bolizing the  volitional  movements  of  consciousness.  May 
physical  symbols  be  taken  as  indirect  or  mediate  sym- 
bols of  mind?  If  so,  then  these  physical  terms  are  so 
much  more  open  to  observation  than  their  correspondents 
in  consciousness,  and  they  furthermore  yield  themselves  so 
16 


242  SYNTHESIS.  parth. 

much  more  readily  to  that  exact  treatment  which  science 
loves,  that  they  may  be  taken  by  science  as  the  physical 
equivalents  of  the  conscious  movements  which  they  indi- 
rectly symbolize.  We  thus  reach  the  fundamental  plank 
of  a  psycho-physical  creed.  After  the  question  of  fact, 
which  we  may  assume  to  be  settled,  the  other  question  of 
science  is  one  of  validity,  and  we  have  now  seen  the  ground 
on  which  the  validity  of  the  whole  psycho-physical  treat- 
ment of  the  connection  between  the  physical  and  mental 
depends. 

Let  it  be  understood  that  the  parallelism  on  which 
psycho-physics  here  rests  is  one  of  correspondence  between 
physical  movements  which  are  symbols  of  real  extra-con- 
scious activities  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  real  volitional 
movements  of  consciousness  on  the  other.  In  such  a  cor- 
respondence as  this  the  question  of  causality  or  interaction 
could  not  arise.  How  could  a  physical  symbol  produce  a  real 
conscious  movement?  On  the  other  hand,  how  could  we 
conceive  an  act  of  will  as  directly  producing  a  physical 
symbol?  We  are  able  thus  to  justify  both  Hume  and 
the  plain  man  while  keeping  the  question  of  science  free 
from  metaphysical  entanglements.  The  justification  of 
the  faith  of  science  in  its  psycho-physical  presumption 
arises  out  of  two  considerations:  (1)  that  it  is  found  to 
work  as  the  basis  of  psychological  method.  This  is  the 
more  empirical  justification.  (2)  That  the  connection 
between  the  two  orders  is  not  liable  to  be  broken.  Wherever 
consciousness  is  found,  there  will  also  exist  its  connection 
with  the  physical. 

Turning  now  to  the  more  special  case,  that  of  the  con- 
nection of  the  brain-activity  with  sensation,  it  must  be 
admitted  that  the  bond  here  seems  closer  than  that  between 
volition  and  its  physical  correspondents.  Just  in  propor- 
tion to  the  success  of  the  student  of  brain-psychology  in 
defining  and  mapping  out  the  brain-tract  which  is  active  in 
connection  with  sensation,  does  the  minute  correspondence 
between  what  Professor   Strong  calls  the   "  brain-event ' ? 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  213 

and  the  sensation  appear.  I  do  not  mean  by  this  cor- 
respondence anything  analogous  to  similarity.  It  is  more 
analogous  to  the  point  to  point  correspondence  of  mathe- 
matics. For  example,  the  volume  of  the  sensation  will 
correspond  to  the  extent  of  the  nerve-tract  that  is  active, 
while  the  vividness  of  the  sensation  will  have  some  relation 
to  the  intensity  of  the  stimulus.  Again,  the  configuration, 
position,  distance  and  size  of  the  object  will  have  their 
corresponding  properties  in  the  movements  of  the  nerves. 
It  is  needless  to  go  on  specifying.  The  correspondence  here 
seems  so  perfect  that  it  suggests  a  beautifully  arranged 
pre-established  harmony.  But  keeping  the  question  of 
science  isolated,  there  is  no  uncertainty  here  as  to  the  fact 
of  parallelism  or  as  to  the  possibility  of  making  it  the  basis 
of  psycho-physical  investigation.  The  only  question  is 
how  the  correspondence,  as  science  deals  with  it,  shall  bo 
construed.  We  saw  in  the  case  of  volition  that  the  terms 
compared  were  physical  symbols  and  real  movements  of 
consciousness.  Here,  however,  both  terms  of  the  relation 
are  symbolic.  The  sensation-signal,  as  we  saw,  represented 
the  starting-point  of  a  double  process.  It  stimulated  the 
will  to  attention  and  it  led  to  the  development  of  cognition. 
Now,  the  whole  of  cognition  which  develops  from  the  signal, 
symbolizes  the  extra-mental  existent,  the  tree  on  the 
campus.  But  what  the  brain-movement  symbolizes  is  the 
activity,  the  dynamic  agency,  of  this  extra-conscious 
existent.  We  have,  then,  two  sets  of  symbols :  one  intra- 
conscious,  representing  the  extra-conscious  object;  the 
other  also  intra-conscious,  for  these  movements  are  percep- 
tions, but  representing  the  extra-conscious  activity  of  these 
objective  existents.  Why  should  they  not  be  parallel  in- 
asmuch as  they  both  symbolize  the  same  thing  in  different 
aspects;  the  one  the  existent  as  the  bearer  of  certain 
secondary  and  primary  qualities,  the  other  the  same  existent 
as  putting  forth  certain  activities  by  means  of  which  it 
brings  about  its  recognition  in  the  consciousness  of  another 
existent?     We  are  not  going  into  metaphysics  here;  we 


244  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

are  simply  pointing  out  the  fact  that  science  is  here  dealing 
with  two  sets  of  symbols  which  spring  from  a  common 
origin.  This  is  the  justification  of  its  faith  that  the  psy- 
cho-physical ground  is  here  secure. 

If  we  keep  in  mind  the  fact  that  in  this  psycho-physical 
parallelism  between  brain-event  and  mind-event  science  is 
dealing  with  two  sets  of  movements  which,  as  perceived, 
are  two  sets  of  symbols  of  the  same  thing  (the  objective 
existent  in  its  more  static  aspect  in  which  it  stands  as  the 
source  of  a  whole  group  of  stimulations  the  symbols  of 
which  are  combined  in  cognition;  and  this  same  objective 
existent  in  its  dynamic  function  of  stimulating  conscious- 
ness by  means  of  an  activity  which  the  wave-movements 
symbolize),  it  will  be  clear  that  the  two  sets  of  symbols  ought 
to  correspond  inasmuch  as  the  one  set  stands  for  the  stimu- 
lus of  the  sensation,  the  signal  which  leads  to  the  develop- 
ment of  the  complete  cognition,  while  the  other  set  is  simply 
the  cognition  itself  which  directly  represents  the  object. 
1We  have,  then,  two  sets  of  symbols  which  stand  in  the  fol- 
lowing relation;  the  one  symbolizes  an  activity  by  which 
the  objective  existent  stimulates  consciousness  to  a  present 
sensation;  the  other  symbolizes  the  sum  of  activities  from 
the  same  source  which  have  given  rise  to  sensations  at  any 
time  and  whose  symbols  are  recalled  in  consciousness  in 
connection  with  the  present  sensation.  The  present  sensa- 
tion is,  therefore,  a  genuine  signal,  giving  the  hint  to  con- 
sciousness which  proceeds  in  its  work  of  reinstatement  in 
accordance  with  its  own  laws.  We  have,  then,  a  duality 
of  symbols  representing  the  same  thing  but  in  different 
aspects. 

1  It  is  vital  here  that  we  keep  separate  the  brain-activity  and  our 
perception  or  conception  of  this  activity,  which  is  its  symbol.  The 
brain-activity  is  a  summary  of  the  activities  of  the  objective  ex- 
istent, so  far  as  they  are  involved  in  the  present  experience. 

The  two  sets  of  symbols  (i)  of  the  existent  as  a  static  object, 
the  present  perception  (  a  b  )  (2)  the  symbols  of  the  brain  event 
developed  in  a  separate  cognition    (  x  y  ). 

z 

Formula   (  a  b  )   js  parallel  with   (  x  v  ). 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  245 

Now  it  is  clear  in  the  light  of  this  analysis  that  if  we 
keep  the  question  of  science  isolated  no  direct  relation  of 
causation  or  interaction  can  be  supposed  to  exist  between 
the  two  sets  of  terms.  They  are  two  sets  of  symbols  which 
correspond  but  of  which  it  would  be  folly  to  say  that  one 
set  produces  the  other.  When  science  realizes  that  it  is 
dealing  here  with  two  sets  of  symbols  and  distinguishes 
symbol  from  reality,  it  will  no  longer  trouble  itself  about 
the  dynamics  of  the  situation.  The  terms  of  its  calcula- 
tions will  be  a  set  of  symbols  external  to  consciousness  and 
called  physical.  The  justifying  reason  for  taking  the 
movements  of  one  symbol  as  the  equivalents  of  the  other 
in  a  psycho-physical  operation,  will  arise,  then,  primarily 
from  the  fact  that  the  correspondence  bears  out  the  as- 
sumption that  the  variations  of  the  mental  symbol  will 
have  some  calculable  relation  to  the  variations  of  the 
physical  symbol.  And  the  special  reason  for  taking  the 
physical  symbol  as  the  direct  object  of  scrutiny  is  to  be 
found,  of  course,  in  the  fact  that  it  is  more  accessible  to 
experiment  and  more  amenable  to  exact  determination. 
Thus,  if  the  problem  were  that  of  the  reaction-time  of 
various  mental  operations,  we  might  experiment  directly 
with  the  mental  processes  and  gets  results  which  would,  per- 
haps, roughly  approximate  to  the  truth.  But  their  inac- 
curacy would  render  them  unreliable.  The  experimenter's 
control  of  physical  conditions,  however,  makes  it  possible 
for  him  to  so  manipulate  them  as  to  get  results  that  are 
approximately  exact  and  stable. 

We  have  kept  the  question  of  science  isolated  in  order, 
in  the  first  place,  to  make  clear  what  kind  of  terms  enter 
into  that  parallelism  of  the  physical  and  mental  with  which 
the  psycho-physicist  deals.  The  result  has  been  the  dis- 
covery that  the  terms  of  the  relation  are  either  a  set  of 
symbols  related  to  a  set  of  reals  as  in  the  correspondence 
of  the  physical  and  the  volitional,  or  two  sets  of  symbols 
related  to  a  common  source  of  reality.  In  neither  case  can  the 
question  of  immediate  dynamic  connection  legitimately  arise. 


246  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

But  our  second  reason  for  isolating  the  question  of  science 
has  been  to  bring  out  the  fact  that  the  answer  to  this 
question  so  far  as  it  may  be  necessary  to  go  in  order 
to  justify  the  procedure  of  science,  does  not  lead  to  any 
very  deep  insight  into  the  nature  of  things.  It  simply 
amounts  to  the  discovery  that  the  manipulation  of  physical 
symbols  in  certain  conditions  where  the  physical  has  a 
mental  correspondent,  and  in  accordance  with  certain 
approved  methods,  will  lead  to  results  which  will  also  be 
significant  for  the  mental.  Our  procedure  does  not  tell  us 
what  either  the  mental  or  the  physical  is  in  itself.  It 
leaves  us,  in  fact,  glaringly  on  the  outside  of  the  world, 
and,  as  I  apprehend,  does  not  come  anywhere  near  to  satis- 
fying the  deeper  needs  of  science  itself.  What  science 
would  like  to  achieve  is  some  insight  into  the  nature  of 
reality,  and  the  source  of  this  aspiration  is,  no  doubt,  to  be 
found  in  the  fact  that  one  of  the  terms,  at  least,  with  which 
it  deals  is  real.  The  world  of  science  is  a  world  for  con- 
sciousness, and  science  is  not  long  in  finding  out  that  the 
medium  in  terms  of  which  all  other  things  must  be  sym- 
bolically expressed  if  they  are  to  be  expressed  at  all,  cannot 
itself  be  symbolic  but  must  be  the  stuff  of  reality  out  of 
which  symbolism  is  developed.  Science  becomes  acquainted 
with  one  term  of  reality  at  least,  that  is,  consciousness. 
But  unfortunately  it  is  just  the  term  with  which  it  feels 
least  competent  to  deal  directly.  It  can  deal  directly 
with  the  symbol  and  with  the  mental  symbol,  competently, 
only  through  its  relation  to  the  physical  world.  Here  is 
certainly  a  kettle  of  fish.  Science  starts  out  to  know  its 
world  and  ends  by  playing  with  the  shadows  of  the  real 
while  the  real  lies  beyond  its  grasp  and  vision. 

We  are  thus  brought  to  the  ultra-scientific  problem  of 
the  metaphysics  of  the  world  of  consciousness,  the  answer 
to  which  will  involve  two  main  considerations,  (1)  the 
deeper  relation  which  the  psycho-physical  parallelism  sym- 
bolizes, (2)  the  ultimate  metaphysical  construction  to  which 
consciousness  leads.     We  have  found  that  the  isolation  of 


chap.v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  247 

the  question  of  science  leads  to  a  concept  of  the  parallelism 
of  the  physical  and  the  mental  which  excludes  the  supposi- 
tion  of  the  existence  of  any  direct  dynamic  relation  between 
them.  But  it  does  not  exclude  the  supposition  of  an  indirect 
or  mediate  dynamic  connection.  The  parallelism  exists,  as 
we  saw,  either  between  two  sets  of  movements,  one  of  which 
is  real,  the  other  symbolic;  or  between  two  sets  of  symbols. 
Now  while  there  can  be  no  question  of  direct  dynamic 
connection  between  a  set  of  symbols  and  a  set  of  reals,  or 
between  two  sets  of  symbols,  yet  the  suggestion  of  an 
indirect  and  mediate  dynamic  connection  is  not  excluded. 
In  truth  the  deeper  instinct  of  science  of  which  we  have 
spoken  and  which  science  is  not  in  this  instance  in  a  position 
to  follow  out,  not  only  favors  such  a  suggestion  but  empha- 
sizes it.  We  have  seen  in  other  connections  that  science  can 
only  rationalize  its  results  by  connecting  its  generalizations 
with  grounds  that  are  deeper  than  its  own  phenomenal 
terms  and  which  these  sjanbolize.  Perhaps  we  are  dealing 
here  with  just  one  of  those  problems  of  grounding.  But 
of  this  we  shall  be  better  able  to  judge  later  on.  Let  us 
consider  first  the  problem  presented  by  the  voluntary 
activity.  The  whole  situation  may  be  represented  as  fol- 
lows. Some  objective  existent,  the  tree  on  the  campus, 
arouses  in  consciousness  a  sensation-signal  which,  when 
developed  into  cognitive  symbols,  presents  to  my  conscious- 
ness a  tree  hanging  full  of  ripe,  luscious  apples.  This 
supplies  a  volition-stimulus,  the  result  of  which  is  that  I 
will  to  stretch  forth  my  hand  and  pluck  some  of  the  apples, 
and  the  outer  movements  involved  in  carrying  out  this 
resolve  immediately  follow.  Here  is  a  situation  which  in- 
volves the  parallelism  in  both  its  forms,  (1)  between  the 
physical  and  mental  symbols  in  the  cognition  of  the  apple 
tree,  (2)  between  the  outer  physical  movements  antecedent 
to  and  following  the  exercise  of  will,  and  the  volition  itself. 
Now,  in  the  case  of  the  two  sets  of  symbols  the  parallelism 
suggests  a  relation  of  agency,  but  to  suppose  either  set  of 
symbols  to  exercise  this  agency  is  absurd.     What,  then,  is 


248  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  value  of  our  suggestion?  Clearly,  it  leads  us  to  con- 
nect the  parallel  relation  with  some  deeper  fact,  and 
when  we  analyze  the  suggestion  itself  and  find  that  it  is 
logical  rather  than  psychological,  and  that  it  has  wrapped 
up  in  it  the  refusal  of  the  scientific  mind  to  accept  the 
parallelism  as  an  ultimate  fact,  we  begin  to  have  an  insight 
into  the  real  issue.  The  suggestion  of  a  deeper  relation 
is  the  form  which  the  scientific  demand  for  a  grounding 
of  its  phenomena  here  takes.  We  may  then  consider  what 
is  involved  in  this  demand  for  grounding.  We  have  seen 
that  it  means  in  general  the  relating  of  phenomena  as 
symbols  to  underlying  substances  or  forces.  Now  we 
have  seen  that  the  phenomena  here  are  symbols  of  existence, 
and  in  the  last  analysis,  of  activities,  that  is,  of  active 
agency.  The  developed  cognition  is  a  symbol  of  the  tree 
as  an  object,  but  its  elements  are  all  symbols  of  activities. 
Hence  the  objective  existent  is  resolvable,  in  the  last 
analysis,  into  a  persistent  center  or  subject  of  dynamic 
activities.  And  these  activities  are  what  is  really  sym- 
bolized in  both  sets  of  symbols.  We  have,  then,  as  a  net 
result  of  our  study  so  far,  the  conclusion  that  the  parallel- 
ism is  a  relation  between  two  sets  of  phenomena  which  have 
a  common  dynamic  connection  with  a  deeper  ground. 

But  we  have  not  as  yet  come  in  sight  of  the  real  con- 
nection between  the  mental  and  the  physical.  Let  us  pass 
on  to  other  elements  of  the  situation.  We  have  followed 
the  cycle  from  the  objective  existent  to  the  cognition  and 
have  seen  how  the  parallelism  points  to  a  deeper  connection. 
But  the  cognition  itself  is  responsible  for  the  beginning  of 
another  process.  The  cognition  of  the  apples  arouses 
desire,  let  us  say,  and  this  desire  stimulates  the  will  to 
resolve  to  reach  out  the  arm  and  appropriate  some  of  the 
apples.  Here  our  symbol  seems  to  have  power  to  produce 
effects.  But  we  must  bear  in  mind  now  that  we  are  deal- 
ing with  consciousness  and  that  consciousness  stands  to 
us  as  a  real  activity  and  the  only  one,  in  fact,  which  we 
know.     We  have  seen  that  the  activity  of  consciousness 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  249 

develops  a  symbol  which  has  cognitive  value  as  represent- 
ing the  objective  existent.  But  its  cognitive  value  may  not 
be  its  only  value.  It  will  be  a  symbol  in  as  many  respects 
as  it  has  distinct  values.  It  is  a  cognitive  symbol  because 
it  has  cognitive  value.  But  it  has  also  value  for  desire  or 
feeling.  It  not  only  represents  an  object  to  consciousness, 
but  it  represents  the  desirable  to  feeling.  The  representa- 
tion of  the  luscious  fruit  is  thus  a  symbol  of  the  desirable. 
The  satisfaction  of  feeling  in  the  form  of  desire  is,  there- 
fore, the  real  which  the  luscious  apples  symbolize.  There  is 
no  other  primary  incitement  of  will,  in  this  field,  than  the 
desirable  or  its  opposite,  and  the  cognition  is  also  the  symbol 
of  the  desirable.  As  such  it  stimulates  the  will.  The  desire- 
satisfaction  is  thus  the  primary  sensation, — the  signal  which 
consciousness  in  the  form  of  will  translates  into  terms  of 
active  agency.  The  developed  volitional  experience  (the 
resolve  to  stretch  out  the  arm  and  the  rest)  stand  in  con- 
sciousness as  the  practical  counterpart  of  the  developed 
cognition  on  the  theoretic  side. 

But  we  have  not  entered  as  yet  into  the  full  meaning 
of  the  whole  experience.  Superficially,  we  connect  the  act 
of  will  with  the  outer  movements  of  the  arm  by  which  the 
fruit  is  grasped.  But  we  have  now  learned  that  these 
outer  movements  are  symbols,  and  the  question  here  is, 
what  do  they  symbolize?  The  answer  is  that  they  sym- 
bolize those  activities  of  the  extra-conscious  world  which 
are  called  physical  but  whose  real  nature  is  hidden  from 
us.  The  movements  of  the  physical  world  are  open  to 
observation.  But  they  are  perception-symbols  of  energies 
or  forces  which  are  not  representable  and  whose  nature  we 
are,  therefore,  not  in  a  position  to  determine.  But  these 
underlying  forces  are  the  terms  with  which  our  will-activity 
is  really  connected.  We  consciously  will  to  reach  forth 
and  seize  the  fruit.  We  are  conscious  of  the  movements 
of  our  muscles  by  means  of  which  this  resolve  is  outwardly 
carried  into  execution.  But  this  second  consciousness  is 
not  an  effect  or  even  a  continuation  of  the  conscious  will- 


250  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

act.  This  consciousness  develops  a  cognitive  symbol  of 
the  real  transaction,  a  perception  of  the  physical  move- 
ments by  which  the  real  activity  is  symbolized.  The  will- 
consciousness  does  not  continue  on  up  to  the  object  of  its 
resolve,  and  yet  its  resolve  is  realized.  We  have  here  a 
very  strange  situation  and  yet  one  that  is  perfectly  anal- 
ogous, though  in  a  reverse  direction,  to  the  one  which  arises 
in  connection  with  the  original  sensation  or  signal.  We 
saw  in  that  case  how  a  movement  in  consciousness  was 
initiated  for  which  we  could  find  only  physical  antecedents. 
And  while  our  subsequent  analysis  led  us  to  deny  any 
causal  connection  between  the  two  sets  of  symbols  which 
arise,  we  could  not  deny  some  sort  of  a  dynamic  connection 
between  the  underlying  activities  which  were  thus  symbol- 
ized, and  the  sensation-signal  that  arose  in  consciousness. 
Here  in  volition  we  have  the  relation  reversed.  "While  we 
are  led  to  deny  a  dynamic  connection  between  the  will- 
activity  and  the  movements  of  the  muscles,  it  is  not  open  to 
us  to  make  such  a  denial  in  view  of  the  connection  of  will- 
activity  with  the  underlying  forces  of  which  the  physical 
movements  are  the  symbols.  There  are  thus  two  points  of 
connection,  and  they  are  the  vital  ones  for  our  problem,  in 
regard  to  which  science  can  say  nothing  except  that  there 
are  real  bonds  and  that  being  connections  between  dynamic 
agencies,  they  are  doubtless  themselves  dynamic.  The  pos- 
sibility of  the  connection  is  demonstrated  in  its  actuality, 
and  its  dynamic  character  follows  inferentially  from  the 
dynamic  system  to  which  it  belongs. 

What  we  are  cut  off  from  assuming  here  is  that  the 
reality  which  underlies  the  physical  and  the  reality  we  know 
in  consciousness  as  exercising  real  agency,  are  so  radically 
different  in  nature  that  activities  arising  in  one  sphere  of 
reality  may  not  be  propagated  on  into  the  other  sphere  and 
there  realize  appropriate  results.  All  experience  goes  to 
show  that  at  bottom  this  is  the  kind  of  a  world  we  live  in. 
But  this  does  not  enable  us  to  go  very  far  in  the  way  of 
real  insight  into  the  nature  of  things.     Science  can  only 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  251 

say  in  the  light  of  this  deeper  insight  that  its  symbols  bind 
it  over  to  a  doctrine  of  the  world  which  connects  them  with 
underlying  realities.  We  only  know  the  reality  of  con- 
sciousness. What  the  reality  underlying  the  physical  is 
we  do  not  know.  But  the  fact  of  the  propagation  of 
activities  from  one  realm  to  the  other  enjoins  us  from  sup- 
posing that  the  difference  of  nature  between  these  two 
species  of  reality  is  more  than  relative. 

We  come,  then,  to  the  final  metaphysical  question  as  to 
the  ultimate  construction  which  consciousness  leads  us  to 
put  upon  the  world.  It  has  appeared  that  science  is  un- 
able to  put  any  final  interpretation  on  the  terms  with 
which  it  deals.  Its  deeper  insight  leads  it  to  recognize 
realities  underlying  phenomena.  But  it  has  no  available 
insight  that  enables  it  to  reach  any  positive  conclusion 
about  these  realities.  True,  science  finds  itself  enjoined 
from  thinking  the  difference  between  consciousness  and 
the  real  underlying  the  physical  to  be  more  than  rela- 
tive. And  it  has  consciousness  like  an  open  book  from 
which  it  might  be  supposed  that  it  could  obtain  some  val- 
uable clues.  But  from  the  full  use  of  what  it  finds  in 
consciousness,  it  is  enjoined  by  the  kind  of  results  for 
which  its  method  binds  it  over  to  seek.  The  method  of 
science  must  always  be  mechanical  in  the  sense  that  its 
results  must  come  finally  under  the  law  of  natural  causa- 
tion. Again,  science  is  further  limited  by  the  demand 
that  its  results  shall  be  definable  up  to  a  standard  of 
exactness  which  can  only  be  attained  where  its  data  are 
as  open  to  experimental  manipulation  as  are  the  facts 
of  common  observation.  This  standpoint  can  be  attained 
only  in  the  sphere  of  the  purely  physical  or  in  that 
of  the  possible  correlation  of  the  mental  with  the  physical. 
Even  when  the  facts  of  consciousness  seem  to  lie  open, 
science  finds  that  it  cannot  go  very  far  by  the  use  of  pure 
introspection  alone.  After  the  first  greetings  of  the  facts 
of  consciousness  which  we  can  obtain  in  no  other  way  than 
by  introspection,  science  finds  that  it  must  make  its  point 


252  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

of  view  more  and  more  objective  and  that  it  can  proceed 
with  full  assurance  only  when  it  is  seeking  to  determine 
the  mental  through  the  medium  of  its  physical  corre- 
spondent. 

In  the  very  nature  of  the  case,  then,  it  is  not  to  be  ex- 
pected that  natural  science  would  be  able,  without  for- 
swearing its  most  characteristic  methods,  to  make  a  use  of 
consciousness  which  gives  the  primacy  to  introspection. 
This,  however,  is  precisely  what  metaphysics  proposes,  and 
it  derives  some  assurance  here  from  the  fact  that  science 
does  not  deny  all  value  to  introspection.  It  only  denies 
the  adequacy  of  the  introspective  method  for  the  kind  of 
results  it  is  seeking  to  reach.  The  question  whether  the 
method  may  be  valid  for  attaining  other  results  for  which 
science  does  not  seek,  is  left  open.  The  result  of  the  fore- 
going analysis  has  brought  out  the  fact  that  there  are  just 
such  results  as  these.  Science  in  its  profounder  insight 
realizes  a  world  of  realities  whose  nature  and  relations  it 
regards  as  problems  that  lie  beyond  its  determination. 
But  it  does  not  deny  the  reality  of  the  problems  and 
it  does  not  deny  the  possibility  of  any  determination.  The 
field  is  closed  to  science  by  virtue  of  its  mechanical  methods 
and  aims.  But  the  question  is  left  open  whether  an  inves- 
tigation which  proceeds  by  other  methods  and  aims  than 
those  of  science  may  not  be  able  to  reach  results  which, 
though  not  possessing  the  precise  kind  of  value  science 
requires  in  its  results,  may  yet  possess  a  different  species 
of  value  of  a  very  high  order. 

There  is  thus  not  only  an  open  field  for  the  meta- 
physical investigation,  but  its  problems  are  cut  out  for  it, 
and  the  tailor  that  has  done  the  cutting  is  science  itself. 
The  immediate  question  which  science  hands  over  is  that 
of  the  nature  of  the  dynamic  connection  between  conscious- 
ness and  the  real  which  underlies  the  physical  symbols. 
But  the  solution  of  this  question  depends  on  a  deeper 
question:  what  conception  can  we  reach  of  the  nature  of 
that  which  underlies  the  physical?     If  no  conclusions  of 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  253 

any  value  are  attainable  here,  then  it  will  be  found  that  the 
question  of  science  will  also  be  unanswerable.  Now,  if 
we  call  consciousness  a,  and  the  real  which  underlies  the 
physical  x,  and  let  the  sign  of  equality  stand  for  the  fact 
of  reciprocal  influence,  we  have  the  symbol  a=#.  Of  this 
symbol  one  of  the  terms,  a,  is  known,  the  other,  x,  is  known 
to  exist,  but  its  nature  is  unknown;  the  same  is  true  of  =, 
the  reciprocal  influence  is  known  to  exist,  but  its  nature  is 
not  yet  determined.  And  we  have  found  already  that  the 
question  of  the  nature  of  =  must  be  laid  on  the  table  until 
that  of  the  nature  of  x  has  been  taken  up  and  settled. 
Now,  we  have  already  asked  and  affirmatively  answered 
the  question  whether  there  are  certitudes  outside  of  those 
of  science.  We  have  also  similarly  treated  the  questions 
of  starting-points  and  methods.  Theoretically,  there  are 
possible  starting-points,  methods  and  certitudes  which 
possess  a  value  of  their  own  outside  of  the  species  to  which 
science  rightfully  pins  its  faith,  as  science.  But  even 
science  will  endorse  a  procedure  which  starts  with  the  known 
and  attempts  from  it  to  determine  the  less  known  and  the 
unknown.  Taking  our  symbol  then,  a=x,  we  find  that  the 
only  known  term  is  a,  while  only  the  existence  of  the  other 
terms  is  known.  A  method  that  would  hope  to  reach  any 
valuable  results  will  start,  therefore,  with  and  from  con- 
sciousness. But  our  earlier  analysis,  which  has  only  been 
confirmed  by  later  explanations,  has  brought  to  light  the 
fact  that  the  essential  reality  of  consciousness  is  that  of 
self-agency,  which  realizes  itself  through  the  media  of  idea, 
purpose  and  end.  In  other  words,  we  have  found  the 
essential  reality  of  consciousness  to  consist  in  an  agency 
that  is  formally  an  activity  of  self,  and  finally,  teleolog- 
ical  and  end-seeking.  And  to  this  whole  species  of  agency 
we  have  applied  the  term  purposive  to  distinguish  it  from 
agency  of  the  mechanical  species  from  which  the  pur- 
posive is  eliminated.  Let  us  set  up  the  hypothesis,  then, 
that  the  unknown  a;  is  a  reality  of  the  same  species  as  con- 
sciousness.   Then  by  hypothesis  x,  being  the  same  in  nature 


254  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

as  a,  its  agency,— that  is,  its  method  of  getting  results,— 
will  be  the  same,  or  at  least  of  the  same  species.  When  we 
have  determined  conscious  activity  as  purposive  in  its 
form,  we  have  secured  a  premise  from  which  the  inference 
follows  that  the  agency  of  x  will  be  of  the  a  species.  This 
does  not  carry  with  it  the  conclusion,  however,  that  the 
agency  of  x  will  be  a  fully  developed  purposive  agency. 
We  have  the  whole  history  of  consciousness  pointing  to  the 
fact  that  the  developed  agency  of  the  higher  consciousness 
exists  only  in  germ  in  the  lower  forms.  But  what  our  hy- 
pothesis leads  to  is  the  inference  that  the  species  of  agency  is 
the  same  as  that  of  conscious  agency,  whether  we  represent 
it  in  its  germinal  or  its  more  developed  forms.  Our  infer- 
ence rests  on  the  broad  fact  that  consciousness  has  one 
generic  way  of  doing  things,  whether  it  be  found  in  a  jelly- 
fish or  a  philosopher.  If,  then,  we  apply  our  hypothesis  in 
a  way  which  our  knowledge  of  consciousness  will  bear  out, 
the  conclusion  to  which  we  are  led  is  that  x  possesses  a  nature 
of  the  same  species  as  a,  and  that  its  agency  is,  therefore, 
analogous. 

But  then  this  is  only  hypothetical,  and,  you  may  say, 
' '  gratuitous. ' '  That  is  true,  but  we  have  only  used  the  hy- 
pothesis up  to  this  point  in  order  to  ascertain  what  results 
would  follow  from  it.  Let  us  consider,  now,  what  can  be  said 
for  the  hypothesis.  In  the  first  place,  it  is  clear  that  if  this 
hypothesis  be  untenable  there  is  no  other  supposition  that 
can  take  its  place.  If  we  cannot  use  the  analogies  of  a  to  de- 
termine x,  then  x  must  remain  forever  unknown.  But,  sec- 
ondly, the  fact  of  the  mutual  influence  of  a  and  x  carries 
with  it  the  presumption  of  a  common  nature.  That  natures 
wholly  different  should  intercommune  is  wholly  unthinkable. 
The  basis  of  intercommunion  must  be  sameness  of  nature. 
The  fact  of  =  carries  with  it  the  conclusion  that  a  and  x  are 
in  some  respects  the  same,  while  the  fact  that  there  is  no  let 
or  hindrance  in  this  fellowship  carries  the  presumption  that 
the  community  of  nature  is  essential  and  not  superficial  or 
accidental.     How  shall  this  community  of  nature  be  deter- 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  255 

mined?  Here  again  the  method  which  determines  the  com- 
mon nature  from  the  analogies  of  consciousness  has  in  its 
favor  the  fact  that  it  is  a  procedure  from  the  known  to  the 
unknown.  Either  that  or  the  common  nature  must  remain 
forever  unknown.  Thirdly,  there  is  no  alternative  to  the 
method  of  explanation  by  using  the  analogies  of  conscious- 
ness. The  original  transactions  which  led  us  to  assert 
extra-conscious  existents,  were  transactions  within  con- 
sciousness. We  never  get  any  first-hand  knowledge  of 
these  existents.  We  only  assert  them  because,  in  the  last 
analysis,  it  would  be  absurd  to  deny  them,  and  neither 
science  nor  philosophy  can  tolerate  the  absurd.  We  know 
only  one  nature,  and  that  is  consciousness.  But  there  are 
extra-conscious  existents  which  objectively  condition  our 
cognitions  and  rebuff  our  volitional  efforts.  What  is  the 
nature  of  these  existents?  We  cannot  tell  unless  we  see 
our  way  clear  to  the  conclusion  that  they  have  something 
fundamentally  in  common  with  consciousness.  Aside  from 
other  considerations  which  bear  us  out  in  saying  this,  there 
is  the  consideration  that  the  transactions  which  lead  to  our 
assertion  of  the  existence  of  these  objects  are  transactions 
in  the  world  of  consciousness.  But  in  the  fourth  place, 
the  very  form  in  which  the  case  is  transcribed  from  the 
docket  of  science  contains  a  measure  of  implication.  Why 
does  not  science  abide  by  the  bare  parallelism  which  sup- 
plies the  situation  needed  for  the  getting  of  scientific 
results?  We  have  seen  that  the  deeper  insight  of  science 
will  not  rest  satisfied  with  this.  Why  not  ?  Partly  because 
science  cannot  rest  satisfied  in  a  world  of  symbols,  but 
demands  something  deeper.  Partly  also  because  it  cannot 
be  that  a  system  of  coincidences  which  work  out  so  harmo- 
niously has  no  reason  for  existing  except  the  fact  that  so  it 
turns  out  to  be.  The  force  of  these  considerations  leads 
science  to  propound  the  metaphysical  problem.  But  these 
considerations  are  all  demands  which  consciousness  makes 
upon  itself.  Why  should  there  be  anything  deeper  than 
phenomena,  or  more  profound  than  the  parallelism  of  the 


256  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

two  orders?  Simply  because  consciousness  in  its  organ  of 
reason  will  not  have  it  so.  A  world  which  ended  here  would 
be  a  scandal  to  reason. 

When  we  combine  these  considerations  with  the  gen- 
eral argument  for  the  metaphysical  interpretation  de- 
veloped in  these  discussions  as  a  whole,  going  to  show  that 
the  completion  of  a  world-theory  everywhere  involves  a 
synthesis  of  the  concepts  and  methods  of  natural  science 
and  metaphysics,  I  think  we  have  reasonable  grounds  for 
regarding  our  hypothesis  as  something  more  than  a  mere 
supposition.  It  is  a  supposition  which  is  everywhere  borne 
out  by  a  reflection  that  aims  to  be  complete,  and  it  is  a 
hypothesis  of  such  a  nature  that  its  denial  leaves  a  vacuum 
of  unintelligibility  at  the  heart  of  the  world  as  it  also  leaves 
the  last  results  of  science  without  any  rational  justification. 

The  World  of  Existents. 

A  hypothesis,  the  opposite  of  which  is  absurd,  may  not 
possess  the  kind  of  certitude  at  which  science  aims  in  its 
results.  But  it  possesses  a  kind  which  science  presupposes 
in  its  faith  in  the  reality  of  the  world  with  which  it  deals, 
and  to  which  it  points  in  the  deeper  insights  that  convince 
it  of  the  reality  of  problems  which  lie  beyond  the  field  of  its 
own  solutions.  Our  analysis  has  led  us  to  a  point  where 
we  see  that  consciousness  must  itself  absorb  the  whole  of 
reality  or  itself  become  a  pure  illusion.  The  alternative  of 
illusion  is,  of  course,  open,  but  let  him  who  takes  it  bid 
farewell  to  all  reality.  Consciousness  is  the  stuff  put  of 
which  all  other  world-substance  is,  in  the  end,  manufac- 
tured.1 If  it  be  illusion,  then  illusion  is  absolutely  uni- 
versal. The  alternatives  here  are  still  the  reality  of 
consciousness  or  the  universality  of  illusion.  In  taking 
sides  with  consciousness  we  simply  take  the  only  way  open 
to  us  of  escaping  from  universal  illusion.  But  in  taking 
sides  with  consciousness  we  identify  ourselves  with  con- 
sciousness.    There  are  not  consciousness  and  ourselves,  but 

1  See  Appendix  B. 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  257 

just  consciousness,  and  we  are  its  organs.  We  are  thus 
committed  to  the  whole  claim  of  consciousness,  and  we  have 
seen  that  this  is  nothing  less  than  the  whole  of  reality. 
Why,  indeed,  should  it  be  otherwise?  "We  have  seen  that 
all  the  processes  everywhere  which  have  led  to  the  assertion 
of  any  kind  of  existence  have  been  transactions  in  con- 
sciousness. Even  the  colliding  of  two  billiard  balls  is  a 
transaction  in  consciousness,  since  it  comes  to  us  in  terms 
of  conscious  apprehension  and  is  symbolized  under  physical 
analogies.  From  the  subjective  point  of  view  of  the  cog- 
nizing consciousness,  it  is  impossible  to  affirm  anything 
but  the  transaction  in  consciousness.  It  is  only  because 
this  transaction  itself  would  be  thereby  reduced  to  absurd- 
ity that  we  are  forced  to  assert  objective  existents  outside 
of  the  cognizing  consciousness.  But  we  have  been  over  this 
road  and  do  not  need  to  travel  it  again.  This  being  the 
case,  we  naturally  expect  consciousness  to  claim  the 
primacy  in  a  world  which  itself  has  constituted.  And 
when  the  question  of  the  nature  of  the  existents  which  stand 
outside  and  objectively  condition  the  physical  symbols, 
comes  up,  the  claim  of  consciousness  to  be  allowed  to  supply 
the  norms  of  definition  from  the  analogies  of  its  own 
nature  is  both  natural  and  logical;  natural  as  no  one  will 
dispute,  and  logical  because  it  has  been  the  requirement 
of  consciousness  itself  that  has  led  us  to  assert  these 
existents  and  there  are  no  other  analogies  which  could  be 
used  for  definition. 

The  nature  of  objective  existents  must,  then,  be  deter- 
mined after  the  analogies  of  consciousness.  But  there  are 
no  analogies  available  except  those  of  its  deeper  agency. 
The  analogies  of  cognition  are  applicable  only  to  the  world 
of  symbols  inasmuch  as  cognition  expresses  itself  in  sym- 
bols. Now,  we  cannot  say  that  these  objective  existents 
exercise  cognition.  They  may,  but  there  are  no  data  here 
to  turn  our  hypothesis  into  necessity.  The  analogies  we 
must  use  are  those  of  volitional  activity  and  that  central 
agency  by  which  consciousness  goes  out  dynamically  in  its 
17 


258  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

effort  to  overcome  and  realize  the  world.  Now,  in  connec- 
tion with  these  activities  we  cannot  exclude  a  certain  cog- 
nitive quality.  Will  is  not  absolutely  separable  from  idea, 
and  even  in  its  lowest  and  simplest  movements  we  find  that 
consciousness  acts  with  some  degree  of  intelligence.  Its 
mere  touch  is  anticipatory  and  the  principle  of  selective- 
ness  and  end-seeking  is  rooted  in  its  primary  quality  as 
consciousness.  It  is  here  that  the  true  point  of  departure 
is  found  for  the  application  of  the  conscious  analogies. 
We  have  seen  that  the  intercommunion  of  consciousness 
and  the  objective  existents  carries  with  it  an  essential  com- 
munity of  nature.  We  have  to  add  to  that  conclusion  one 
that  we  are  led  up  to  here,  namely,  that  this  community 
of  nature,  when  reduced  to  the  lowest  terms  possible,  will 
doubtless  involve  the  ascription  of  the  lowest  form  of  con- 
scious activity  to  these  objective  existents.  Let  us  call  this 
stage  that  of  simple  feeling-susceptibility, — a  stage  in 
which  an  impulse  arises  as  an  immediate  reaction  upon  a 
stimulation  and  begets  an  immediate  forward  movement  of 
some  kind.  We  have  no  other  means  of  determining  what 
more  than  this,  in  the  way  of  initiative,  the  objective 
existent  may  be  assumed  to  possess.  We  here  strike  a 
minimum  below  which  it  will  not  be  possible  to  go. 

Genetic  psychology  is  teaching  us  that  the  tendency  of 
consciousness  in  the  child  is  to  ascribe  the  maximum  rather 
than  the  minimum ;  that  its  whole  world  is  at  first  a  social 
community  whose  objects  are  all  other  selves.  The  child's 
experience,  however,  of  the  different  modes  of  reaction  of 
different  objects  leads  it  gradually  to  strip  off  some  of  the 
conscious  properties  from  some  of  its  objects  until  at 
length  it  reaches  a  fundamental  distinction  between  the 
inanimate  and  the  animate,  the  latter  being  assumed  to  act 
consciously.  Now,  the  genetic  fact  is  not  without  interest, 
but  our  problem  here  is  critical  rather  than  genetic.  How 
are  we  to  make  a  critical  use  of  conscious  analogies  in 
determining  the  nature  of  objective  existents?  The  answer 
to  this  question  will  lead  to  a  method  which  is  the  reversal 


chap.v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  259 

of  the  genetic.  We  begin  with  the  necessary  minimum, 
and  this  determines  for  us  the  lowest  type  of  existence. 
The  physical  object,  if  by  it  we  mean  the  existent  which 
has  its  symbols  in  cognition  and  in  the  physical  move- 
ments, will  be  one  that  is  reducible  to  a  form  of  agency 
which  involves  at  least  the  bare  rudiment  of  feeling-sus- 
ceptibility. That  is  the  lowest  term  on  which  an  objec- 
tive existent  could  get  itself  recognized :  otherwise  it  would 
be  resolvable  into  a  bunch  of  phenomena  without  any 
substantial  center  of  activity.  Let  us  endeavor  to  see, 
then,  how  this  necessary  minimum  enables  us  to  realize 
objective  existents.  A  world  of  objective  existence  is,  of 
course,  a  world  of  plurality,  for  there  are  at  least  the  con- 
sciousness which  knows  and  the  existent  that  is  known.  But 
we  do  not  need  to  limit  the  plurality.  Let  us  suppose  that 
the  things  of  our  own  world  represent  an  indefinite  plu- 
rality. We  shall  then  have  a  system  of  real  existents  in 
relations  of  intercommunion.  Now  we  have  seen  how  we 
are  led  to  ascribe  the  necessary  minimum  of  conscious 
agency  to  each  of  these  existents.  Here  the  necessity  indi- 
cates itself  in  another  way.  We  have  the  problem  of 
intercommunion  itself  on  our  hands.  How  can  this  be 
effected?  Let  us  suppose  a  movement  of  some  kind  as 
originating  in  the  nature  of  some  existent.  If  we  call  this 
existent  c,  how  is  the  movement  to  be  communicated  to  &% 
It  is  impossible  to  conceive  the  activity,  whatever  it  may  be, 
as  passing  out  of  c  into  d,  for  in  the  first  place  how  could  it 
get  across  to  d%  We  are  obliged  to  drop  the  physical 
analogy  in  order  to  get  rid  of  the  impassable  gulf  between 
the  two  existents.  We  can  only  suppose  that  the  movement 
is  of  the  form  of  a  conscious  activity;  that  it  is  some  sort 
of  a  feeling  for  d,  and  that  the  chasm  does  not  exist  to  it, 
but  that  the  impulse  of  c  is  able  directly  to  beget  in  d  a 
feeling  of  response,  and  that  thus  the  intercommunion  is 
effected.  This  is  at  least  an  intelligible  transaction,  and 
it  explains  what  physics  could  never  explain,  the  real  fact 
which  is  veiled  under  the  symbol  of  transmission.     Nothing 


260  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

is  transmitted,  c  keeps  its  feeling-impulse  and  d  does  not 
part  with  his.  But  we  may  suppose  the  transaction  as 
going  on  indefinitely.  On  the  face  of  it  and  under  the 
veil  of  transmission,  which  is  a  physical  symbol,  the  move- 
ment has,  so  to  speak,  passed  from  c  to  d  and  so  on  to  n,  and 
all  the  energy  has  been  conserved.  But  in  reality  there 
has  been  no  transmission,  and  energy  has  been  conserved 
only  in  the  sense  that  each  term  keeps  its  own  energy 
while  it  is  able  to  induce  a  corresponding  activity  in  the 
existent  that  is  its  neighbor. 

Now  let  us  apply  to  the  mode  of  agency  which  is  embod- 
ied in  feeling-susceptibility,  the  term  spontaneity.  Spon- 
taneity will  then  stand  for  this  spring  of  initiative  in  each 
existent.  A  purely  physical  object  then,  a  mountain  or  a 
stone,  will  be  one  that  is  either  not  a  real  existent  but  a 
mere  bunch  of  phenomena,  or  it  will  be  an  existent  in  which 
this  principle  of  spontaneity  is  at  its  lowest  terms.  This 
is  intelligible  in  view  of  the  fact  that  we  find  some  forms  of 
instinct  in  which  intelligence  is  at  its  lowest  terms.  Spontan- 
eity will  be  at  its  lowest  terms  when  it  is  so  hidden  in  the 
mechanism  of  movement  as  to  be  completely  latent;  that 
is,  indiscernible  in  the  movement  to  which  it  gives  rise. 
The  phenomenon  or  symbol  of  spontaneity  in  that  stage 
will  be  the  movements  which  we  call  physical.  If  we  sup- 
pose the  spontaneity  to  become  more  explicit  we  shall  have  a 
gradual  modification  in  the  form  of  the  symbolic  move- 
ment that  arises ;  first  in  the  plant  where  a  germ  of  select- 
iveness  appears,  though  without  consciousness  in  any 
explicit  form ;  then  in  the  animal  where  consciousness 
becomes  explicit  and  the  form  of  movement  changes  accord- 
ingly. We  have  thus  only  to  suppose  a  gradual  develop- 
ment of  the  spontaneity  of  the  underlying  nature,  in  order 
to  discover  the  ground  of  the  distinctions  which  arise  be- 
tween inorganic  and  organic  and  between  different  stages 
of  the  organic  itself,  in  the  sphere  of  phenomena. 

This  opens  the  way  for  a  last  word  about  the  two  orders. 
We  have  seen  that  the  parallelism  is  not  final  but  points  to 


chap.  v.  THE  MENTAL  AND  PHYSICAL.  261 

a  dynamic  connection  of  reals  deeper  than  itself.  We  have 
now  traced  this  dynamic  connection  and  found  it  to  be  real. 
But  it  is  not  an  intercommunion  between  two  different 
orders  of  reality,  which  would  be  impossible.  There  is  in 
the  last  analysis  only  one  order  of  reality,  the  order  of 
consciousness.  But  conscious  reality  may  be  in  different 
stages,  as  we  have  seen.  What  we  call  the  physical  existent 
turns  out,  on  analysis,  to  be  only  a  conscious  real  at  the 
lowest  level  of  its  existence.  Here  it  is  a  spontaneity  which 
is  so  latent  as  not  to  reveal  itself  in  the  form  of  the  move- 
ments to  which  it  gives  rise.  The  lower  organic  is  a  higher 
stage  where  spontaneity  becomes  to  some  extent  explicit 
in  a  kind  of  selectiveness,  but  as  yet  below  consciously 
determined  movement.  If  we  put  these  two  subconscious 
stages  together  and  call  them  physical,  the  stages  above  this 
will  represent,  the  superphysical  order  of  consciousness 
proper.  We  shall  thus  have  the  two  orders  of  movements, 
the  physical  and  the  superphysical,  but  these  orders  will 
not  point  back  to  two  orders  of  reality ;  rather,  to  one 
order  in  different  stages  of  development.  If  it  be  asked 
how  this  affects  the  question  of  the  reality  of  the  physical 
world,  I  would  answer  that  it  leaves  this  reality  untouched 
to  everyone  but  the  dogmatic  materialist.  If  he  is  going 
to  insist  that  the  very  last  things  in  reality  are  hard, 
'uncutable'  pieces  of  matter  and  that  these  constitute  the 
veritable  tortoise  on  which  the  world  rests,  then  I  suppose 
the  rest  of  the  world  will  have  to  be  left  to  perish  in  its 
sins.  But  what  physics  requires  is  an  adequate  grounding 
of  the  species  of  movement  which  forms  its  staple.  We  have 
seen  how  the  foregoing  analysis  not  only  spares  this  move- 
ment but  grounds  it  by  showing  for  the  first  time,  perhaps, 
how  it  is  possible.  Consciousness  begins  by  apparently 
tearing  down  the  labored  structures  of  science  and  common 
sense,  but  having  asserted  its  prerogative  it  becomes  a 
restorer  and  shows  us  how  everything  of  value  has  not  only 
been  conserved  but  grounded  more  securely  in  the  nature 
of  things. 


CHAPTER  VI. 


SOCIAL   ACTIVITIES. 


A.  The  Social  Individual. 
A  discussion  of  the  social  activities  of  conscious  beings  will 
involve  two  somewhat  distinct,  nevertheless  closely  related, 
topics,  ( 1 )  The  social  individual,  its  rise  and  development ; 
(2)  The  social  community,  its  basis  and  evolution.  That 
the  social  community  is  composed  of  social  units,  and  is, 
from  one  point  of  view,  simply  an  aggregate  of  these  and 
their  activities,  is  obvious;  what  more  than  this  it  may  be 
will  be  a  subject  for  future  determination.  But  before 
entering  on  the  discussion  of  the  social  community,  it  is 
clearly  necessary  that  something  should  be  known  about  the 
social  units  of  which  it  is  composed.  Our  doctrine  here  is 
that  the  first  chapter  in  social  community  must  be  psycholog- 
ical and  that  the  student  of  social  phenomena  can  only  hope 
to  build  successfully  provided  he  seek  a  psychological 
foundation  for  his  facts. 

We  consider  here,  (1)  the  rise,  (2)  the  development  of 
the  social  individual.  As  a  starting-point  for  a  doctrine 
of  the  social  individual,  let  us  refer  back  to  some  of  the 
results  of  the  last  chapter.  The  conclusion  was  there 
reached  that  all  existence  is  of  one  species,  fundamentally, 
and  that  the  distinctions  which  arise  are  all  relative  rather 
than  absolute.  The  common  property  or  endowment  of  exist- 
ents  which  conditioned  their  intercommunion  was  found  to 
be  spontaneity  or  feeling-susceptibility,  and  we  saw  also  that 

262 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL*  ACTIVITIES.  263 

the  distinctions  in  the  character  of  phenomena  which  mark 
oft'  the  purely  physical  from  the  organic,  and  the  lower 
organic  from  the  higher  in  which  consciousness  has  become 
explicit,  arise  in  connection  with  the  successive  stages  in 
the  development  from  mere  spontaneity,  its  lowest  stage, 
where  it  manifests  none  of  the  ordinary  phenomena  of 
consciousness  excepting  its  initiative,  to  the  highest  where 
consciousness  has  become  reflective.  We  do  not  need  to 
contend  here  that  the  social  is  a  function  of  mere  spon- 
taneity. The  only  question  open  is  one  regarding  the  point 
or  stage  in  the  development  of  spontaneity  at  which  it 
becomes  distinctively  social.  Now  while  the  impropriety  of 
conceiving  purely  physical  activities  under  social  categories 
will  be  admitted,  there  may  be  less  unanimity  in  regard  to 
the  lower  organic.  The  phenomenon  of  intercommunion 
is  universal  and  the  plant  manifests  it  in  common  with  the 
animal.  The  plant  displays  also  a  selectiveness  that  indi- 
cates, in  a  sense,  a  will  of  its  own.  But  whether  this 
selectiveness  be  wholly  unconscious,  or  accompanied  by 
some  rudimentary  kind  of  consciousness,  is  not  directly 
open  to  determination.  Notwithstanding  the  fact,  then,  that 
ordinarily,  consciousness  is  excluded  from  the  life  of  the 
plant,  we  shall  be  justified,  I  think,  in  regarding  the  ques- 
tion as  one  that  is  debatable  but  perhaps  not  open  to  final 
solution. 

We  reach  ground  that  is  not  debatable  when  we  enter 
the  sphere  of  animal  life.  Here  it  is  known  that  con- 
sciousness in  the  form  of  sensation  and,  therefore,  of  feel- 
ing-susceptibility, has  become  explicit ;  that,  in  short,  the 
animal  is  not  only  moved  by  feeling-impulse,  but  that  it 
also  feels  this  movement  in  itself.  We  may  fix,  then,  as 
the  minimum  limit  or  lowest  level  of  the  social,  the  point 
where  the  animal  first  becomes  aware  of  its  feeling-impulse 
as  a  movement  in  itself.  Whenever  a  being  has  become 
the  conscious  subject  and  bearer  of  feeling-impulse,  it  has 
then  qualified  in  the  class  of  socials  whether  it  has  actually 
become  social  or  not. 


264  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

What  essential  form,  then,  will  the  social  activity 
assume?  One  thing  is  clear,  that  while  social  activity 
involves  cognition  in  various  ways  it  is  not  distinctively  cog- 
nitive. It  would  be  folly  to  identify  sociality  with  knowl- 
edge. Referring  back  to  the  illustration  of  the  tree,  the 
social  is  not  to  be  identified  with  the  cognitive  activity  that 
develops  the  representation  of  the  tree  laden  with  luscious 
apples,  but  rather  with  that  aroused  by  the  desirable  quality 
of  this  fruit.  In  short,  the  social  is  a  practical  activity 
with  a  practical  end  in  view,  and  we  may  designate  con- 
sciousness in  relation  to  its  social  activities  as  the  practical 
self  or  will.  The  social  self  is  a  consciousness  in  which  the 
activity  of  will  is  central.  It  is  feeling-impulse  raised  to 
some  degree  of  conscious  intensity. 

But  we  have  as  yet  only  determined  the  genus  of  the 
social  activity  as  a  practical  function  of  will.  Conscious- 
ness, in  the  exercise  of  its  central  agency,  becomes  the  sub- 
ject of  social  experience.  This  will  perhaps  be  admitted 
by  everyone  without  debate.  But  the  social  experience 
itself:  What  is  it  and  why  is  it  called  social?  We  shall 
enter  more  fully  into  this  in  the  next  chapter.  Here  it  will 
be  sufficient  to  determine  two  things:  (1)  That  there  is 
involved  in  the  social  situation  other  existents  besides  the 
subject  of  the  social  experience.  One  isolated  being  could 
not  be  a  socius.  The  subject  of  the  social  experience  must 
have  its  other  existent  with  which  it  interacts.  (2)  This 
other  must  be  socially  interesting  or  desirable  in  some  way 
before  it  can  have  the  power  to  arouse  social  activity. 
What  is  it,  then,  to  be  socially  interesting  or  desirable? 
It  would  be  moving  in  a  circle  to  reply  that  to  be  socially 
interesting  or  desirable  is  to  be  capable  of  satisfying  some 
social  want  or  demand.  Yet  perhaps  such  an  answer  would 
help  to  define  the  issue.  We  can  perhaps  strike  in  the 
neighborhood  of  the  truth  in  the  general  statement  that 
every  thing  desires  its  own  hind.  This  will  bear  criticism, 
I  think,  if  we  confine  our  subject  to  conscious  things. 
Every  conscious  being  desires  its  own  kind,  and  this,  no 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  265 

doubt,  primarily  because  it  derives  a  species  of  satisfaction 
from  having  itself  thus  doubled,  that  could  be  attained  in 
no  other  way.  Now  we  may  reduce  the  terms  of  the  rela- 
tion, thus  characterized,  down  to  the  minimum  limit.  So 
long  as  it  remains  true  that  one  being  derives  this  unique 
kind  of  satisfaction  from  the  presence  of  its  objective 
other,  the  situation  will  be  genuinely  social. 

Let  us  assume  this  as  the  primary  fact  of  sociality. 
The  problem  wre  have  set  for  the  remainder  of  this  chapter 
is  one  that  is  almost  purely  psychological :  namely,  how 
does  the  individual  unit  arrive  at  the  realization  of  itself 
as  being  also  a  social  unit?  Or,  to  put  the  question  differ- 
ently, how  does  the  individual  self  come  to  know  itself  as  a 
social  rather  than  as  an  isolated  self?  Our  question  is, 
then,  mainly  one  of  knowledge  and  conscious  realization 
rather  than  a  question  of  the  forms  of  social  activity.  We 
ask  how  the  self  comes  into  the  possession  of  those  elements 
of  social  consciousness  which  constitute  it  a  sodas  rather 
than  an  isolated  self?  And  in  answering  this  our  appeal 
will  be  to  the  experience  of  which  we  know  most,  that  of 
the  child  and  the  man. 

How  then,  we  ask,  is  the  consciousness  of  self  as  a 
socius  achieved  ?  In  the  first  place,  it  is  clear  that  we  shall 
have  to  deny  the  validity  of  an  older  point  of  view  in 
which  the  self  was  conceived  as  standing  apart  from  its 
social  relationships  and  as  viewing  these  as  external  to  its 
own  proper  interests  and  activities.  On  this  point  the  old 
psychology  can  derive  little  support  from  the  ordinary 
consciousness  of  the  plain  man  to  which  its  appeal  was  so 
commonly  made;  for  the  plain  man's  self  is  one  that  in- 
cludes all  his  possessions,  so  that  even  an  insult  to  his  dog 
is  taken  as  an  indignity  to  himself.  The  real  self  is  the 
concrete  self  of  the  social  relations;  the  self  that  can  say 
''nothing  that  touches  any  of  my  possessions  can  be  indif- 
ferent to  me."     xIt  is  the  business  of  the  new  psychology 

1  The  passage  from  here  to  the  end  of  the  first  paragraph  on 
page    280    of    this    work    is    taken,    with    a    few    verbal    changes, 


266  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

to  show  the  validity  of  this  by  exhibiting  either  analytic- 
ally, that  the  stripping  off  of  the  social  relations  leaves  a 
mutilated  ego  and,  when  carried  far  enough,  nothing  that 
is  definable;  or,  genetically,  that  it  is  one  and  the  same 
consciousness  and  life-history  in  which  are  developed  the 
realization  of  the  individual  self  and  that  of  the  social 
other,  and  that  the  distinction  between  the  two  is  intra 
rather  than  ultra  to  the  real  self.  What,  then,  do  we  mean 
by  the  self  as  a  socius,  and  how  is  the  idea  of  the  socius 
to  be  scientifically  grounded?  The  answer  will  involve  an 
investigation  in  two  parts,  the  first  dealing  analytically, 
the  second  genetically,  with  the  problem.  In  the  first 
place,  then,  we  may  ask  for  an  analytic  answer  to  the  ques- 
tion we  have  proposed.  Let  us  take  as  our  point  of  de- 
parture the  consciousness  of  an  adult,  say  that  of  an 
intelligent  man  who  is  at  the  same  time  innocent  of  psy- 
chology and  not  much  given  to  self-reflection.  Take,  for 
example,  the  ordinary  man  of  business  and  society  whose 
life  is  absorbed  in  outer  activities,  and  let  our  analysis 
proceed  from  the  standpoint  of  his  own  conscious  relation 
to  his  activities  rather  than  from  the  aloofness  of  a  mere 
spectator.  His  world  will  be  represented,  in  fact,  as  one 
in  which  his  own  aggressive  and  organizing  agency  stands 
central  and  to  which  every  part  of  it  will  be  related.  Let 
such  a  man  begin  to  inspect  his  own  conscious  processes; 
or,  what  would  be  still  better,  let  someone  who  is  trained  in 
this  species  of  analysis  enter  into  his  point  of  view  as  far 
as  may  be  possible,  and  perform  the  work  of  analysis  in 
his  behalf.  If  the  man  be  primarily  a  man  of  business 
and  only  in  a  secondary  sense  a  votary  of  society,  it  will  be 
found  that  the  standpoint  from  which  he  is  most  accustomed 
to  consider  himself  and  the  issues  of  his  life  is  that  of  his 
business  relations,  and  that  proceeding  out  from  these  he 
develops  a  conscious  representation  of  himself  as  so  bound 
up  with  a  community  of  other  selves  of  the  same  type,  and 

from  an  article  of  the  writer's  on  The  Social  Individual  published 
in  the  Psychological  Review. 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  267 

whose  point  of  view  is  identical  with  his  own,  as  to  give 
rise  to  a  whole  system  of  responses  in  the  form  of  demands 
and  obligations.  This  system  of  responses  will  constitute 
what  is  most  real  in  his  life,  and  were  he  to  attempt  to 
form  any  construct  of  himself  as  he  would  be  apart  from 
these  vital  relations  of  the  business  world,  he  would  either 
find  the  enterprise  impossible,  or  the  self  he  would  achieve 
would  be  hypothetical  rather  than  real.  The  real  self  is 
the  self  of  vital  interests,  and  apart  from  this  there  can  be 
no  real  self.  The  only  resource  open  to  the  man  in  ques- 
tion, if  he  be  not  satisfied  with  his  business  self,  is  to 
transfer  his  vital  interests  to  some  other  world.  Let  this 
be  the  world  of  society.  Here  it  will  be  found  that  the 
same  drama  repeats  itself;  his  vital  responses  take  on  the 
society  order,  and  when  he  attempts  to  dissociate  himself 
from  his  society  relations  the  self  that  remains  is  mutilated 
and  to  a  great  degree  divested  of  reality.  This  analysis 
may  be  carried  through  the  whole  sphere  of  his  social  rela- 
tionships so  as  to  include  the  domestic,  civic  and  religious, 
and  the  same  conclusions  will  be  found  to  hold  true.  The 
self-consciousness  of  the  family  man  is  that  of  the  individ- 
ual clothed  with  a  specification,  so  that  the  real  self  is  now 
father,  husband  or  son,  and  this  specification  thus  modifies 
and  determines  the  basis  of  all  his  conscious  responses  and 
consequently  the  whole  sphere  of  his  conscious  responsi- 
bilities, privileges  and  enjoyments.  Again,  the  civic  con- 
sciousness, by  virtue  of  which  he  becomes  a  citizen,  a 
patriot  and  a  member  of  a  political  party,  is  the  bearer  of 
a  still  further  specification  of  the  central  self.  The 
citizen-consciousness  is  that  of  the  conscious  self  specified 
and  denned  in  the  direction  of  the  civic  interests  and  rela- 
tionships, and  thus  becoming  the  bearer  of  a  larger  complex 
of  duties,  privileges,  responsibilities,  rights  and  enjoy- 
ments. Lastly,  his  religious  consciousness,  by  virtue  of 
which  he  becomes  a  worshiper  of  God,  is  a  still  further 
specification  in  view  of  his  sense  of  unique  relation  to  a 
being  that  transcends  him.     The  result  is  a  self  defined  and 


268  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

specified  in  this  particular  direction,  and  responding  con- 
cretely to  a  system  of  motives  that  are  distinctively  relig- 
ious ;  in  short,  a  self  that  is  not  real  apart  from  its  religious 
relations. 

We  have  only  to  follow  out  this  analysis  into  every  detail 
of  life  in  order  to  reach  the  conviction  that  the  self  which 
is  central  in  all  these  activities,  and  which  we  may,  there- 
fore, call  the  cardinal  self,  is  not  in  any  sense  independent 
of  its  social  relations,  or  in  any  sense  complete  without 
them.  The  social  relations  constitute,  in  fact,  the  modes 
by  which  the  self  passes  from  the  stage  of  indeterminate- 
ness,  where  it  only  vaguely  realizes  itself,  to  that  of  more 
complete  specification  and  definiteness,  through  which  it 
becomes  more  completely  self-realized.  The  socius  is, 
therefore,  the  more  fully  defined  and  realized  self.  Wil- 
liam James,  in  his  very  suggestive  chapter  on  The 
Consciousness  of  Self,  in  the  second  volume  of  his  Psy- 
chology, gives  an  exhibition  of  this  analytic  method1  and 
shows  how  the  self  achieves  the  various  and  successive 
stages  of  its  definition  in  terms  of  the  social  medium.  He 
represents  these  several  stages  as  so  many  selves,  and 
maintains  that  a  man  has  a  plurality  of  selves,  each  of 
which  has  its  own  characteristic  ways  of  reacting  upon  its 
world.  This  may  be  accepted  as  a  striking  and,  on  the 
whole,  appropriate  way  of  stating  the  case,  provided  we 
do  not  go  to  the  extreme  which  James  himself  avoids,  and 
assert  that  these  selves  are  not  only  distinguishable,  but 
also  separable.  Our  doctrine  will  lose  coherence  if  we  do 
not  hold  in  connection  with  it  that  it  is  the  same  cardinal 
self  that  is  central  and  continuous  in  all  this  variation  of 
form,  and  that  the  process  as  a  whole  is  to  be  taken  as  the 
mode  in  which  this  cardinal  self  attains  to  definite  and 
concrete  self-consciousness. 

Passing  now  to  the  second  method  of  dealing  with  the 
social  aspect  of  the  self,  the  genetic,  we  find  important 

1  Psychology,  Vol.  I.,  Chapter  X.  The  Consciousness  of  Self. 
This  chapter  has  marked  an  epoch  in  the  recent  psychology  of  Self. 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  269 

illustrations  of  it  in  the  work  which  is  being  done  in  the 
field  of  genetic  psychology.  The  general  aim  of  genetic 
psychology  is,  of  course,  to  discover  and  formulate  the 
stages  and  conditions  of  the  development  of  consciousness. 
But  a  special  department  of  the  science  has  arisen  of  late 
in  response  to  a  pressing  demand  for  a  more  adequate 
treatment  of  the  psychological  aspects  of  the  social  con- 
sciousness. The  result  has  been  a  group  of  works  which 
have  had  for  their  aim  the  genetic  study  of  the  social 
individual  or  self.  Taking  the  work  of  Baldwin  as  de- 
veloped in  his  Social  and  Ethical  Interpretations  as  em- 
bodying the  common  aim  of  these  works,  we  may  found 
on  it  the  following  representation.  The  problem  of  this 
branch  of  the  genetic  enterprise  is  to  show  how  the  social 
consciousness  may  be  brought  under  the  rubrics  of  psy- 
chological evolution  so  as  to  give  a  demonstration  of  the 
solidarity  of  the  social  with  the  consciousness  of  the  in- 
dividual self.  And  this  aim  is  achieved  by  showing  in 
detail  how  the  self  in  coming  to  its  own  clear  and  definite 
self-apprehension  is  brought  by  the  same  process  to  a  recog- 
nition of  its  social  other.  The  investigations  we  have  in 
mind  posit,  by  implication  at  least,  a  germinal  self,  or  at 
least  a  consciousness  of  the  self-type,  as  the  inner  individual 
center  of  response,  and  the  object  is  to  exhibit  the  method 
and  the  environmental  forces  which  lead  this  germinal  self- 
consciousness  through  the  progressive  stages  of  a  develop- 
ment in  which  the  social  becomes  a  corporate  part  of  the 
very  self.  Now  what  is  needed  in  order  that  this  aim  may 
be  effected  and  the  development  be  seen  to  be  real  is  to 
determine,  (1)  what  is  meant  by  social  environment  and 
heredity,  (2)  the  characteristic  form  of  reaction  in  this 
field,  and  (3)  the  kind  of  definition  or  specification  which 
the  self  obtains  as  a  result.  In  short,  the  categories  of  the 
evolution  must  be  defined  with  reference  to  the  kind  of 
material  in  which  they  are  supposed  to  work. 

Now  it  is  not  difficult  to  determine  the  nature  of  the 
social  environment.     If  we  consider  the  self  as  a  social 


270  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

unit  in  a  system  of  interacting  units,  it  will  be  clear  that 
the  environment  is  simply  the  social  medium  in  which  the 
organism  exists  and  performs  its  functions,  and  that  this 
medium  not  only  includes  the  social  individuals  of  the 
community,  but  also  the  social  institutions  and  conventions 
of  the  community-life  and  conduct.  Let  us  represent  a 
child,  for  instance,  as  a  floating  center  of  adaptation  in  a 
medium  that  will  embrace  not  only  other  social  individuals 
and  institutions,  but  will  also  hold  in  solution  the  whole 
current  mass  of  conventions,  convictions  and  tendencies 
that  are  characteristic  of  the  time.  This  complex  will  rep- 
resent the  environment  with  which  the  child's  consciousness 
will  be  in  interactive  relation.  What,  then,  shall  we  desig- 
nate as  social  heredity?  It  is  possible,  of  course,  that 
social  modifications  may  be  transmitted  in  a  direct,  organic 
way.  But  our  opinion  as  to  this  would  be  largely  deter- 
mined by  the  theory  of  heredity  which  we  regarded  as 
nearest  the  truth.  It  is  obvious  that  a  Weismannian 
could  have  little  sympathy  with  the  notion  of  the  organic 
transmission  of  social  effects.  If,  however,  we  recognize 
the  superorganic  character  of  the  social,  we  shall  not  be 
disposed  to  think  it  strange  if  we  are  asked  to  look  in  the 
superorganic  field  for  the  principle  of  the  conservation  of 
social  effects.  In  truth,  we  have  been  asked  by  several 
writers  of  the  present  to  look  into  the  heart  of  the  social 
medium  itself  for  this  principle  of  conservation.  When 
we  consider  this  medium  carefully  we  find  that  it  not  only 
contains  a  mass  of  what  we  may  call  social  traditions  in 
solution,  but  that  there  is  a  tendency  in  this  medium  for 
these  traditions  to  embody  themselves  not  only  in  institu- 
tions which  perpetuate  certain  great  ideas  or  trends  of  the 
past,  but  also  to  give  themselves  an  unorganized  though  well- 
defined  form  in  what  may  be  called  the  spirit,  which  the 
past  has  projected  into  the  present.  This  spirit  will  mani- 
fest itself  most  broadly  in  civilizations,  less  broadly  in 
national  character,  so  far  as  it  grows  out  of  traditions. 
It  will  give  itself  more  and  more  circumscribed  but  not  less 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  271 

powerful  embodiments  in  the  traditional  spirit  of  tribes, 
cliques,  special  institutions  and  families;  the  spirit  of  the 
family,  for  example,  being  one  of  the  most  potent  educators 
of  the  child.  The  tendency  of  this  conserving  force  is, 
therefore,  toward  fixity  of  definite  types,  in  distinction 
from  that  of  the  environment,  which  is  a  medium  in  which 
everything  tends  to  become  fluent.  Now  it  is  to  this  con- 
serving force,  however  it  may  express  itself,  whether  in 
the  perpetuity  of  institutions,  the  conservation  of  literature 
and  art,  or  in  the  hereditary  spirit  of  family,  tribe  and 
nation,  that  the  name  social  heredity  is  to  be  applied,  and 
it  is  evident  that  when  we  have  overcome  a  little  our 
biological  prejudices  against  the  superorganic  in  general 
we  shall  be  ready  to  admit  that  we  have  a  force  here  which 
performs  a  real  function  of  conservation  and  transmission. 
We  shall  take  the  liberty,  then,  to  agree  with  those  who 
have  thus  defined  the  principle  of  social  heredity. 

The  second  problem  we  have  to  determine  is  the  form 
which  the  responsive,  adaptive  movement  takes  in  this 
field.  The  psychologists  to  whom  we  have  referred  develop 
two  lines  of  investigation  which  have  a  bearing  on  the 
question,  the  first  of  which  has  for  its  object  the  exhibition 
of  the  general  method  by  which  the  subject-consciousness 
comes  to  a  realization  of  itself  and  its  world,  while  the 
second  aims  to  determine  the  principle  by  means  of  which 
this  result  is  achieved.  Now  in  regard  to  the  general 
method  by  which  the  subject-consciousness  realizes  its 
world,  it  has  been  carried  almost  to  the  point  of  demonstra- 
tion, I  think,  that  the  movement  is  first  objective.  Con- 
sciousness goes  out  upon  the  objective  world  in  some  pulse 
of  aggressive  activity,  and  in  this  act  is  able  in  some  way 
to  penetrate  and  realize  its  object.  This  leads  to  a  return 
reactive  movement  in  which  consciousness,  as  the  result  of 
its  penetration  of  its  world,  attains  to  a  higher  and  better 
defined  conception  of  itself.  The  general  movement  is 
thus  circular  and  embraces  objective  and  subjective  stages. 
What,  then,  is  the  principle  through  which  this  movement 


272  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

realizes  itself?  Here  again  we  come  upon  a  superorganic 
phase  of  our  problem.  The  principle  or  category  which 
was  first  pointed  out  by  Tarde,  and  developed  by  Baldwin, 
Royce  and  others,  is  that  of  imitation,1  a  term  that  is  some- 
Avhat  difficult  to  define,  but  whose  operation  may  be 
definitely  conceived.  Let  us  suppose  that  a  boy  of  say 
six  years,  who  is  the  son  of  a  carpenter,  after  observing 
his  father  plane  and  fit  together  some  flooring  boards, 
procures  a  plane  and  some  pieces  of  board  and  makes  the 
effort  to  plane  them  and  fit  them  together.2  The  process 
is  manifestly  one  of  imitation,  and  the  boy  has  the  repre- 
sentation of  his  father 's  action  as  a  copy  which  he  is  trying 
to  reproduce.  By  a  series  of  tentative  movements  let  us 
suppose  that  the  boy  succeeds  in  a  passable  reproduction 
of  the  copy  he  has  set  before  him.  We  have  here  not  only 
a  transaction,  but  an  experience.  The  transaction  is  the 
imitative  movement  or*  series  of  movements  by  means  of 
which  the  boy  has  reproduced  a  certain  kind  of  effect  in 
the  objective  world.  The  experience  is  the  subjective 
reaction  of  this  result,  the  modification  or  specification 
which  the  self  has  achieved  when  it  has  not  only  expressed 
the  emotional  exaltation  which  we  call  the  feeling  of  suc- 
cess, but  has  also  become  denned  by  its  knowledge  of  the 
feeling  of  a  carpenter  when  he  produces  the  original  of  the 
boy's  copy.  In  other  words,  the  boy  has  not  only  produced 
an  effect  in  the  objective  world,  but  he  has  also  denned  a 
consciousness  in  himself  analogous  to  the  consciousness 
which  in  his  father  accompanied  the  act  of  carpentry. 
And  it  is  open  to  the  analyst  in  this  field  to  point  out  how 

1  It  is  a  very  interesting  fact  that  before  the  psychologists  had 
begun  to  appreciate  imitation  as  a  principle  of  mental  and  social 
growth,  such  a  writer  as  the  late  Walter  Bagehot  realized  its  great 
importance  as  a  principle  of  political  organization  and  made  a 
masterly  use  of  it  in  his  classic  work  on  Physics  and  Politics. 

2  This  illustration  is  taken  from  an  incident  that  actually  hap- 
pened in  connection  with  the  building  of  the  writer's  house  several 
years  ago. 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  273 

this  new  consciousness  becomes,  by  virtue  of  the  fact  that 
it  takes  the  form  of  a  defined  idea,  a  motive  impulse  to 
further  activities  in  the  same  line.  We  thus  have  exhibited 
the  operation  of  a  principle  which  tends  to  the  repetition 
of  activities  on  a  progressively  higher  scale,  and  thus  to  the 
perfection  of  the  adaptive  result. 

Let  us  now  pass  on  to  the  third  point,  and  consider  the 
kind  of  modification  or  specification  which  the  self  receives 
as  the  result  of  this  process.  Referring  once  more  to  the 
case  of  the  boy,  it  is  clear  that  the  knowledge  of  the  way 
in  which  an  objective  act  of  skill  is  to  be  performed  will 
not  be  the  only  respect  in  which  his  self -consciousness  will 
become  defined.  More  important  than  this  in  its  psycholog- 
ical bearings  will  be  the  fact  that  through  his  activity  the 
boy  is  able  to  enter  into  his  father's  consciousness  and  to 
realize,  in  fact,  how  a  carpenter  feels  in  connection  with 
his  work.  In  short,  he  has  made  an  important  step  in  the 
direction  of  mastering  the  carpenter's  point  of  view  from 
which  he  contemplates  and  reacts  upon  his  world.  We 
have,  now,  only  to  change  the  illustrations  to  forms  that 
are  more  distinctively  social,  as,  for  example,  the  imitation 
by  children,  of  family,  social  or  religious  functions,  in  order 
to  be  able  to  see  that  this  category  of  imitation  stands  as 
a  definite  mode,  whether  we  regard  it  as  the  only  mode  or 
not,  by  and  through  which  the  growing  consciousness  not 
only  makes  progressive  definition  and  qualification  of  itself, 
but  also  progressively  defines  the  inner  nature  of  its  social 
other. 

If  now  we  take  into  account  both  lines  of  psychological 
investigation,  we  find  that  in  both  inquiries  the  social 
vindicates  itself  as  an  essential  element  in  the  denned  con- 
sciousness of  self.  The  analytic  inquiry  made  this  clear 
by  showing  that  to  strip  off  the  social  modification  is  also 
to  take  away  the  definitions  of  self -consciousness,  so  that 
where  the  process  has  been  completed  there  will  remain 
nothing  but  the  wholly  undefined  cardinal  self  which  the 
whole  investigation  has  presupposed.     The  various  social 


274  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

selves  are  reducible,  therefore,  in  the  last  analysis  to  phases 
of  the  one  central  self.  The  results  of  the  genetic  inquiry 
have  been  found  to  be  on  the  whole  confirmatory  of  the 
result  of  analysis.  The  problem  here  is  one  of  history,  and 
the  aim  is  to  show  how  the  self  develops  its  social  char- 
acter. The  outcome  of  the  investigation  is,  as  we  have 
seen,  not  only  confirmatory  of  the  result  of  the  analysis, 
but  it  teaches  an  impressive  lesson  in  its  own  way.  When 
we  have  followed  the  process  by  which  the  social  elements 
gain  entrance  into  the  growing  consciousness,  and  have 
seen  that  it  is  the  very  process  also  in  which  the  self-con- 
sciousness becomes  defined,  our  conviction  becomes  that 
of  one  who  has  been  permitted  to  be  present  at  a  demon- 
stration. 

Admitting  the  truth  of  the  doctrine  as  thus  far  de- 
veloped, it  is  still  open  to  us  to  ask  whether  the  boy's  own 
subjective  consciousness  with  which  he  accompanies  the 
progressive  stages  of  the  objective  activity  is  not  his  only 
immediate  experience,  and  whether  he  does  not  learn  how 
his  father  feels  in  a  given  situation,  by  traveling  through 
that  situation,  and  first  learning  how  he  himself  feels  in 
connection  with  it. 

This  seems  to  be  a  more  adequate  view,  and  we  are 
disposed  to  recant  anything  we  may  have  said  to  the  con- 
trary, and  to  put  in  its  place  the  statement  that  the  boy 
learns  the  true  subjectivity  of  situations  by  traveling 
through  them,  and  that  having  the  model  of  his  father 
traveling  through  the  same  situation  in  mind,  the  inter- 
pretation of  the  father's  consciousness  is  the  result  of  a 
largely  spontaneous  application  of  analogy.  This  will 
enable  us  to  define  the  boy's  relation  to  his  model  in  a  way 
that  will  save  the  initiative  to  his  own  consciousness ;  for  if 
it  turns  out  that  there  is  only  one  way  of  getting  at  the 
inner  consciousness  of  another,  namely,  by  traveling  through 
some  objective  movement  in  an  imitative  way  which  gener- 
ates directly  a  modification  of  our  own  consciousness  that  is 
referred  to  the  consciousness  of  the  other,  through  the  model 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  275 

that  connects  it  with  the  same  kind  of  activity,  then  we  are 
in  possession  of  a  datum  that  will  be  important  when  we 
come  to  determine  how  one  conscious  self  may  interact  with 
another. 

Analysis  of  the  situation  makes  it  evident  that  the 
above  statement  of  the  case  is  correct,  and  that  while  the 
boy  seems  to  be  reading  his  father's  consciousness  directly 
through  his  model,  he  is,  in  the  first  instance,  determining 
his  own  consciousness  by  means  of  the  imitative  activity, 
and  reaches  the  construct  of  his  father's  consciousness  only 
by  what  we  may  venture  to  call  an  immediate  analogical 
inference.  If  this  be  true,  the  question  may  arise  as  to  the 
precise  function  which  the  model  performs  in  the  boy's 
development.  The  imitative  function  is  clear  enough,  and 
there  can  be  no  question  that  what  the  boy  has  in  the  fore- 
ground of  his  consciousness  is  not  simply  a  representation 
of  a  series  of  movements,  but  rather  the  representation  of 
this  series  as  connected  with,  and  as  being  the  movements 
of,  a  definite  individual,  his  father.  The  whole  model  is, 
therefore,  a  representation  of  his  father  performing  a  series 
of  movements  and  the  boy's  attempt  to  imitate  the  whole 
situation.  It  is  clear,  then,  that  the  effort  to  imitate  is  in 
reality  an  effort  on  the  part  of  the  boy  to  identify  himself 
with  his  model,  and  that  this  identification  involves  his 
reading  himself  consciously  into  the  standpoint  of  his 
model,  so  that  his  own  consciousness  and  that  of  his  model, 
so  far  forth  as  that  special  series  of  activities  is  concerned, 
shall  be  the  same.  Now  we  have  here,  I  think,  an  in- 
structive example  of  the  typical  method  by  which  the  self 
comes  into  conscious  relations  with  other  selves  and  is  able 
to  form  constructs  of  the  selves  which  stand  related  to  it 
as  its  social  others.  We  are  not  dealing  here  with  the 
practical  motives  that  may  enter  into  the  situation  and 
lead  to  actual  association.  Men,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  asso- 
ciate for  all  sorts  of  reasons.  The  question  here  is  differ- 
ent. Assuming  that  men  do  and  will  associate  for  a 
variety  of  reasons,  we  ask:  What  is  that  cognitive  process 


976  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

which  makes  it  possible  for  them  to  associate  and  without 
which  association  of  the  social  type  would  be  impossible? 
Mr.  Spencer  has  given  a  general  answer  to  this  in  the  sec- 
ond volume  of  his  Psychology,  in  which  he  maintains 
that  in  order  to  sympathize  with  our  fellows  we  must  be 
able  to  represent  to  ourselves  their  consciousness  and  their 
actual  menial  condition.1  Now  the  whole  theory  of  imita- 
tion may  be  regarded  as  a  grounding  of  this  general  prin- 
ciple by  showing  how  the  representation  of  another's 
consciousness  is  achieved.  And  the  analysis  of  the  imita- 
tive situation  has  led  us  to  expect  that  in  it  we  have 
involved  the  most  vital  point  of  cognitive  relationship 
between  one  individual  consciousness  and  another.  Let  us 
endeavor,  then,  to  make  this  clear.  We  have  seen  that  a 
necessary  condition  of  imitation  is  a  model  in  the  foreground 
of  consciousness.  The  boy's  model  is  his  father  planing 
and  fitting  floor  boards.  Only  a  part  of  this  model  is, 
however,  an  external  representation.  The  most  vital  part 
for  us  is  internal  and  consists  in  a  construct  which  the 
boy  has  formed  of  the  consciousness  of  his  father.  If  now 
we  scrutinize  the  situation  with  sufficient  care  we  shall  find 
that  the  boy's  construct  of  his  father's  consciousness  which 
he  has  incorporated  in  his  model  is  one  that  is  defined  just 
so  far  as  his  experience  of  his  father  enables  him  to  define 
it,  and  beyond  that  it  is  undefined,  or  at  least  but  vaguely 
guessed  at.  And  the  point  of  vital  interest  here  is  the  fact 
that,  before  the  imitative  activity  begins,  just  that  part 
of  the  father's  consciousness  which  is  directly  involved  in 
the  series  of  movements  the  boy  is  trying  to  reproduce, 
will  be  an  undefined  region  for  the  boy,  and  that  the 
imitative  movement  will  have  as  its  result  its  definition. 
Let  us  represent  this  part  of  the  father's  consciousness  by 
x;  it  will  be  clear,  then,  that  to  the  boy  x  is  an  unknown 
quantity,  and  that  the  value  of  this  quantity  is  to  be  de- 

1  Principles  of  Psychology,  Vol.  II.,  Corollaries;  I.,  Sociality  and 
Sympathy. 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  277 

termined  by  the  experiment  itself.  That  x  shall  be  an 
unknown  quantity  is  then  an  essential  condition  of  the 
experiment.  The  boy  is  doubtless  unaware  of  this,  and  he 
is  least  of  all  interested  in  a  psychological  experiment. 
All  that  he  is  conscious  of  is  the  fact  that  his  model  is 
interesting  to  him,  and  that  there  is  a,  to  him,  undefined 
impulse  to  attempt  to  realize  it.  Nevertheless,  he  is  taking 
part  in  a  very  profound  experiment,  and  is  putting  both 
science  and  metaphysics  under  obligation.  Let  the  prob- 
lem here  be  to  determine  the  value  of  x.  Now  the  known 
terms  are  the  present  consciousness  of  the  boy,  which  is 
undefined  in  its  relation  to  x;  the  model  which  connects  a 
series  of  movements  with  the  father's  consciousness,  which 
to  the  boy  is  also  undefined  as  regards  x;  and  thirdly,  the 
impulse  to  imitation— that  is,  to  a  reproduction  of  the 
model.  These  are  known  data.  How,  then,  will  the  boy 
proceed  to  ascertain  the  value  of  x%  The  answer  will  be 
as  follows.  Obeying  the  impulse  to  imitate  his  model  he 
will,  no  doubt  in  a  very  tentative  way,  proceed  to  perform 
the  series  of  movements  involved.  He  will  provide  himself 
with  a  carpenter's  plane  and  with  some  pieces  of  flooring 
board,  and  will  proceed  to  use  the  plane  as  he  has  seen 
it  used,  and  finally  to  fit  the  pieces  of  board  together  so 
that  the  raised  part  of  one  will  fit  into  the  groove  of  the 
other,  and  he  will  no  doubt  prosecute  the  experiment  until 
he  has  succeeded  in  obtaining  a  satisfactory  result.  This 
will  represent  the  whole  outward  process,  and  will  be  all 
perhaps  that  the  boy  could  give  a  very  clear  account  of  to 
his  own  consciousness.  But  in  the  meantime  x  has  not 
dropped  out  of  the  problem,  and  some  very  important  steps 
have  been  taken  in  the  determination  of  its  value.  For 
the  boy  has  been  learning  how  a  carpenter  feels  in  con- 
nection with  his  work,  or  this  part  of  it,  and  in  doing  so 
has  defined  his  own  consciousness  as  respects  the  unknown 
term  x.  The  value  of  x  expressed  in  terms  of  his  own 
consciousness  is  the  first-hand  knowledge  he  has  acquired 


278  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

of  how  the  carpenter-consciousness  operates  in  connection 
with  this  particular  series  of  movements.  We  have,  then, 
as  the  first  step  in  the  solution,  the  determination  of  the 
value  of  x  for  the  boy's  own  consciousness.  But  it  still 
remains  to  determine  the  value  of  x  for  the  father's  con- 
sciousness. The  peculiarity  of  the  situation  here  is,  of 
course,  the  fact  that  the  father-consciousness  is  assumed 
already  to  know  the  value  of  x  for  itself,  and  that  the 
problem  is  altogether  one  for  the  consciousness  of  the  boy. 
How  shall  the  boy  reach  the  construct  of  his  father's  con- 
sciousness so  that  he  may  be  able  to  sympathize  with  him 
in  his  work  ?  It  is  clear  that  in  order  to  discover  the  value 
of  x  in  the  father's  consciousness  the  boy  must  realize  it  in 
his  own,  and  then  using  his  own  ^-defined  consciousness  as 
a  model  he  will,  by  the  use  of  the  analogical  reference, 
construct  a  like-defined  consciousness  for  his  father,  and 
will  assume  that  his  father's  conscious  relation  to  his  work 
will  be  the  same  as  his  own.  And  having  thus  determined 
the  value  of  x  for  his  father's  consciousness,  he  will  be 
able,  taking  the  common  value  of  x  as  his  basis,  to  enter 
sympathetically  into  his  father's  experience. 

The  above  analysis  has  been  followed  out  far  enough 
to  enable  us  to  see  clearly  the  modes  by  which  one 
conscious  self  enters  into  and  realizes  the  consciousness 
of  another  self.  There  is  no  magic  involved,  nor  is 
the  relation  purely  outward  and  extrinsic.  But  we  find 
that,  through  the  stimulus  of  the  model  in  the  foreground 
of  consciousness,  the  boy  (and  his  experience  may  here  be 
taken  as  typical)  enters  into  a  series  of  movements  which 
enable  him  to  effect  a  new  definition  in  his  own  conscious- 
ness, and  it  is  through  this  self-definition  that  he  is  able  to 
form  his  construct  of  the  consciousness  of  another.  Now 
it  is  evident  that  Ave  may  extend  this  analysis  beyond  the 
limits  of  well-defined  imitation,  so  as  to  include  the  direct 
as  well  as  the  indirect  methods  of  interaction,  and  the 
principle  will  be  the  same.     I  mean  by  this  that,  whether 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  279 

we  conceive  the  father  as  reacting  directly  upon  the  boy,  or 
the  boy  as  reacting  directly  upon  his  father,  it  will  be  true 
of  these  direct  reactions,  as  it  is  of  the  indirect  reactions 
in  which  imitation  is  overt,  that  each,  in  order  to  reach  a 
construct  of  the  consciousness  of  the  other,  must  draw  it 
up  in  terms  of  his  own  inner  experience  in  similar  rela- 
tions. This  brings  the  issue  to  a  point  where  the  last  and 
most  vital  term  in  the  theory  of  the  social  consciousness 
may  be  brought  out  and  denned.  We  have  seen  that  every 
step  we  take  in  construing  the  inner  consciousness  of  an- 
other—that is,  in  conceiving  the  existence  of  another  like 
ourselves— is  preceded  by  a  specific  definition  of  our  own 
self -consciousness  in  just  the  respect  in  wiiich  we  proceed 
to  define  the  other;  and  we  have  discovered  this  in  con- 
nection with  the  fact  that  we  were  able  to  reach  this  defini- 
tion, first,  of  self,  and  then,  of  the  other,  through  the 
medium  of  some  common  outer  movement  or  series  of 
movements,  which  we  were  able  to  relate  to  both  self  and 
the  other  as  their  common  activities.  Neglecting  this 
latter  feature  for  the  present  and  taking  into  account  only 
the  inner  relation  between  self -consciousness,  and  that  of 
the  other,  it  is  clear  that  the  condition  of  being  innerly 
conscious  of  another  self  is  the  becoming  ourselves  conscious 
in  the  definite  sense  involved,  and  that  it  is  from  this 
definite  self -consciousness  that  we  form  the  construct  or 
concept  from  which  we  read  ourselves  into  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  other.  The  primacy  of  self-consciousness  is 
thus  secured,  and  the  consciousness  of  the  other  is,  in  this 
fundamental  sense,  its  function.  When,  therefore,  we  ask, 
either  how  the  self  comes  to  ascribe  its  analogies  to  another, 
or  how  the  other  secures  for  itself  a  representation  in  the 
consciousness  of  the  self,  and  thus  the  power  to  influence 
it  internally ;  the  answer  must  be  one  in  which  this  primacy 
is  respected.  For,  whether  we  suppose  that  the  conscious- 
ness in  which  the  effect  is  to  be  produced  has  before  it  a 
definite  model,  as  in  explicit  imitation,  or  simply  certain 


280  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

outer  signs  which  it  interprets,  we  shall  find  that  the  inter- 
pretation in  either  case  will  involve  the  bringing  of  the 
sign  to  the  touchstone  of  some  inner  experience.  Thus, 
when  the  child  begins  to  cry  on  seeing  her  companion's 
finger  bleed,  the  result  is  no  immediate  effect  of  the  repre- 
sentation, but  acquires  its  emotional  power  through  some 
process  which  associates  it  with  an  inner  experience  of  pain 
of  the  child's  own,  arising  from  an  analogous  cause.  The 
touch  that  makes  us  kin  is,  therefore,  an  inner  touch,  while 
the  objective  and  outer  motive  which  leads  to  this  touch  is 
either  an  imitative  movement  or  a  representation  that  is 
rendered  capable  of  a  reference  to  the  inner  consciousness 
of  another  by  means  of  its  prior  association  with  inner 
experiences  of  our  own. 

The  conclusion  of  the  whole  matter  may  be  stated  in 
the  following  terms.  We  learn  as  the  result  of  certain 
experiences  to  ascribe  our  inner  consciousness  or  its  analo- 
gies to  another  being  like  ourselves.  The  outward  instru- 
ments of  this  act  are,  broadly  speaking,  associations  and  im- 
itation. But  when  we  pass  from  the  problem  of  the  media- 
ting instrument  to  that  of  the  internal  experience  itself,  we 
find  that  we  are  able  to  enter  into  conscious  social  relations 
with  our  social  other  only  by  virtue  of  the  fact  that  we 
are  able  by  these  agencies  to  make  a  register  of  experiences 
in  our  owu  consciousness,  which  we  are  led  to  regard  as 
a  true  equivalent  of  experiences  in  the  consciousness  of 
the  other.  We  are  led  to  repose  this  confidence  in  the 
representative  character  of  our  own  experience,  not  through 
the  imitative  and  associative  activities  themselves,  but  first 
and  proximately  by  the  similarity  of  our  imitative  move- 
ments to  the  model  we  are  reproducing,  and  ultimately  by 
the  conscious  activity  in  which  we  assert  the  other  as  a  real 
existent.  This  is  fundamental ;  we  first  assert  real  existents 
and  then  we  bring  ourselves  en  rapport  with  them  through 
a  similarity  of  their  inner  experience  with  our  own  that  is 
inferred  from  the  similarity  of  our  outer  activity  to  that 
of  the  model  imitated. 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  281 

The  problem  we  have  been  investigating  here  is  not  that 
of  the  character  of  the  individual  as  a  socius,  but  rather  the 
question  how  he  comes  to  be  a  socius  and  the  method  by 
which  he  comes  to  apprehend  his  social  relations.  We  have 
seen  that  sociality  could  arise  at  all  only  on  condition  that 
conscious  beings  should  find  some  satisfaction  in  the  pres- 
ence of  other  existents  like  themselves.  "We  have  in  this 
chapter  specially  concerned  ourselves  with  the  cognitive  as- 
pect of  our  problem,— the  means  by  which  conscious  beings 
become  aware  of  their  social  relations.  The  problem  has 
been  one  of  form  rather  than  one  of  substance.  If  we  ask 
what  is  the  substance  or  the  stuff  of  sociality,  we  are  simply 
asking  what  there  is  in  a  conscious  being  that  would  interest 
it  in  another  conscious  being  or  make  it  interesting  to  its 
other.  This  is  a  question  to  which  an  answer  in  terms  of  de- 
tail would  be  practically  impossible.  But  we  may  reach  cer- 
tain broad  generalizations  which  will  have  value.  Let  us 
not,  in  the  first  place,  forget  the  elements  of  the  social  situa- 
tion,— at  least  two  existents  in  conscious  intercommunion. 
If  I  am  to  be  in  social  relations  with  you,  I  must  at  least  be 
aware  of  your  existence.  But  I  must  be  aware  of  more  than 
this,  I  must  find  you  interesting  in  some  way,  and  interest- 
ing in  a  practical  sense.  You  may  be  interesting  in  the  way 
of  setting  theoretic  problems  without  being  socially  inter- 
esting. To  be  socially  interesting  you  must  at  least  set 
practical  problems.  AVell,  let  it  be  so ;  interest  presupposes 
feeling,  and  feeling  the  ability  to  be  pleased  or  pained  by 
what  comes  to  us  in  our  experience.  If  I  know  you  as  a 
social  other,  I  know  you  as  possessing  the  same  capacity  for 
being  pleased  or  pained  by  the  experiences  which  come  to 
you.  And  each  of  us  knows  that  the  other  knows.  What 
then?  Simply  that  here  is  a  situation  that  is  like  a  train 
of  gunpowder  for  social  phenomena.  Cognitively,  each  of 
us  enters  into  the  consciousness  of  the  other  and  becomes 
a  spectator  of  his  life.  And  thus  each  learns  to  know 
what  pleases  and  pains  the  other  and  to  enter  into  this 


282  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii 

other's  experience  sympathetically,  as  Mr.  Spencer  says.  I 
think  though,  that  we  need  two  words  here  instead  of  one, 
for  we  may  hate  as  well  as  love  what  we  see.  Let  us  say 
sympathetically  or  antipathetically.  And  entering  sympa- 
thetically or  antipathetically  into  the  situation  of  another, 
we  shall  either  identify  ourselves  with  the  feeling  of  the 
other,  or  we  shall  set  ourselves  against  it  and  experience  the 
opposite  feeling.  Thus  sympathy  or  antipathy,  benevo- 
lence or  malevolence,  will  be  developed.  These  are  two 
names  for  general  attitudes  of  feeling  and  will,  and  they  are 
determinants  of  all  social  relations.  Of  course  there  will 
be  gradations  between  these,  and  mixings  of  these  and  per- 
haps points  of  difference.  But  broadly  speaking,  social 
events  will  be  determined  along  these  lines. 

We  cannot  assume,  then,  that  in  all  cases  the  interest 
we  take  in  our  other,  even  though  it  forces  us  into  social 
relations  with  him,  will  lead  to  results  of  comity.  Antip- 
athy is  just  as  natural  as  sympathy,  and  malevolence  is 
no  less  normal  than  benevolence.  Sociality  includes  hates 
and  antagonisms  with  their  consequent  separations  and 
disruptions,  as  well  as  loves  and  sympathies  with  their 
bonds  and  organizations.  What  can  be  said  without  quali- 
fication is  that  the  whole  social  situation  is  a  practical  one ; 
that  it  rests  on  community  of  nature  and  that  this  com- 
munity of  nature  begets  community  of  interests  and 
community  of  likes  and  dislikes.  Thus  it  comes  about  that 
while  the  social  includes  the  dislikes  as  well  as  the  likes, 
and  is  interwoven  throughout  with  antagonisms  and 
dividing  interests,  yet  the  very  origin  of  sociality  secures 
that  the  forces  of  adhesion  and  organization  shall  be 
inclusive  of,  and  stronger  than,  the  forces  of  separation 
and  disorganization.  For  when  we  say  that  sociality 
arises  because  one  social  being  finds  another  practically 
interesting,  the  fact  of  social  organization  itself  is  sufficient 
to  prove  the  dominance  of  the  sympathetic  over  the 
antithetic  forces.  Were  the  antithetic  forces  to  become 
dominant,  this  would  mean  a  dissolution  of  all  sociality. 


chap.  vi.  SOCIAL  ACTIVITIES.  283 

None  the  less  are  they  social  forces  performing  a  social 
function  in  subordination  to  the  forces  of  organization. 
The  units  of  which  the  complex  social  web  called  the 
community  is  made  up,  are  the  social  individuals  we  have 
been  studying.  We  are  ready  now  to  take  up  the  problem 
of  the  social  community. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

SOCIAL   ACTIVITIES. 

B.     The  Social  Community. 

In  developing  the  doctrine  of  the  social  individual,  two 
things  have  been  made  prominent  as  essentials.  The  first 
is  the  fact  that  sociality  is  an  original  attribute  of  man's 
psychic  nature.  God  does  not  make  man  a  biped  and  leave 
it  to  circumstances  to  make  him  a  social  being.  He  is  by 
nature  a  being  who  can  be  reached  only  through  his  in- 
ternal susceptibility  for  receiving  and  returning  impres- 
sions. The  fundamental  interactions  of  his  nature  with 
other  natures  are  social.  This  was  the  first  point.  Again, 
in  seeking  the  processes  and  agencies  by  which  the  individ- 
ual consciousness  develops  its  rapport  with  its  social  other, 
we  have  been  led  to  emphasize  not  only  association,  the 
operation  of  which  is  clear,  but  more  especially  imitation, 
the  principle  on  which  a  group  of  recent  thinkers  including 
Tarde,  Royce  and  Baldwin,  have  put  so  much  emphasis,  and 
we  have  made  an  elaborate  attempt  to  show  how  these  prin- 
ciples, and  particularly  the  latter,  stand  central  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  making  of  the  social  individual.  Now  the  doctrine 
of  the  social  community  rises  directly  out  of  that  of  the  so- 
cial individual.  The  nature  of  the  individual  supplies  the 
norms  of  all  the  ground-concepts  of  sociology.  This  would 
scarcely  be  admitted  by  those  sociologists  who  take  a  wholly 
objective  view  of  their  science,  regarding  it,  with  Spencer, 
as    a    description    of    social   phenomena    under   biological 

284 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  285 

analogies;  with  Quetelet,  as  a  statistical  study  of  social 
facts;  with  Durkheim,  as  concerned  principally  with  the 
division  of  labor;  or  with  Gumplowicz,  as  finding  its  chief 
theme  in  the  struggle  of  the  races.  There  is  no  question 
here  as  to  the  necessity  of  the  objective  investigation  in 
order  to  complete  the  data  or  the  method  of  the  science. 
What  is  contended  for  is  simply  that  the  constructive 
norms  which  supply  the  ground-concepts  of  the  social  com- 
munity can  be  most  successfully  discovered  and  formulated 
by  a  study  of  the  social  consciousness  as  it  manifests  itself 
in  communal  forms.  In  the  first  place,  what  is  the  basis 
of  what  we  call  sociality  ?  The  answer  sends  us  back  to  the 
individual  in  whose  social  nature  we  seek  the  norm  of  all 
social  organization.  This  norm  has  been  characterized  in 
various  ways,  among  which  that  of  Professor  Giddings  is, 
no  doubt,  one  of  the  most  suggestive.1  Let  us  with  Giddings 
define  this  norm  as  the  Sense  of  Kind.  What,  then,  is  the 
sense  of  kind,  and  how  does  it  become  a  fit  basis  for  social 
phenomena  ?  We  are  obliged  to  go  back  to  the  individual  in 
order  to  determine.  Our  study  of  the  social  individual  has 
revealed  to  us  the  grounds  of  his  social  activity.  In  the 
first  place  we  know  that  he  must  be  a  real  existent  and  not 
a  mere  phenomenon.  Secondly,  he  must  be  a  conscious 
being.  Otherwise  he  could  be  social  in  appearance  only. 
Again,  he  must  be  a  cognitive  being,  capable  of  developing 
some  kind  of  a  representation  by  means  of  which  he  is 
enabled  to  enter  into  and  realize  the  conscious  activity  of 
his  social  other.  We  have  learned  in  some  detail  the  im- 
portance of  the  cognitive  medium,  which  may  be  repre- 
sented, of  course,  in  accordance  with  any  stage  of  mental 
development. 

All   this,    however,   is   preliminary   to   the  real    social 
reaction  which  occurs  when  one  conscious  unit,   through 

1 1  take  Professor  Gidding's  work  as  typical  because  the  terms 
he  uses  seem  to  lend  themselves  with  equal  facility  to  analytic  and 
genetic  treatment.  I  have  not  been  unmindful  of  the  important 
work  of  other  writers  even  when  I  have  not  directly  referred  to  it. 


286  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  medium  of  its  cognitive  insight,  enters  into  the  con- 
scious life  of  another  conscious  unit  and  finds  it  interesting. 
The  first  explicit  act  of  sociality  takes  place  when  one  unit 
consciously  realizes  the  conscious  states  of  another  con- 
scious unit  and  enters  into  them  sympathetically  or  anti- 
pathetically.  When  a  is  able  to  realize  and  enter  sympa- 
thetically or  antipathetically  into  &'s  feeling-reactions 
which  express  themselves  in  satisfactions  or  the  opposite; 
in  such  a  way  that  he  experiences  in  his  own  consciousness 
a  measure  of  the  same  feeling-reactions  or  their  opposites, 
he  has  performed  the  initial  act  of  sociality.  But  in  point- 
ing out  the  fact  of  the  social  reaction  and  its  mode  we  have 
not  answered  the  question  why  the  social  experience  should 
take  place  at  all.  We  have  seen  that  consciousness  is  a 
condition,  but  what  if  the  units  were  totally  different 
in  nature,  so  that  there  could  be  no  points  of  conscious 
community  ?  This  may  not  be  possible,  but  it  is  at  least  con- 
ceivable. It  would  then  represent  a  purely  anti-social  situa- 
tion out  of  which  no  social  phenomenon  could  arise.  There 
must  be  a  common  nature,  and  I  am  prepared  to  accept 
Professor  Gidding's  sense  of  kind,  provided  it  be  not  too 
narrowly  construed.  The  conscious  unit  in  order  to  enter 
socially  into  the  life  of  another  conscious  unit  must  find 
this  unit  its  real  other,  a  being  of  the  same  species  as  itself. 
There  must  be  a  community  of  nature  to  the  extent  that  will 
enable  the  one  unit  to  find  in  the  other  a  type  of  feeling- 
reaction  like  its  own,  so  that  its  feeling  regarding  it,  if  put 
into  words,  could  be  stated  as  follows :  "In  this  being 's  feel- 
ing-reactions I  find  my  own  way  of  reacting  repeated.  It  is 
a  being,  therefore,  in  which  I  find  myself  taking  the  same 
kind  of  interest  as  that  which  I  have  in  myself."  If 
we  keep  the  question  of  method  separate  here  from  the 
question  of  fact,  I  do  not  see  that  there  can  be  much  ground 
for  difference  of  opinion  as  to  the  fact.  The  sense  of  kind 
will  simply  be  my  sense  of  the  sameness  of  the  feeling- 
reactions  of  another  conscious  unit  with  those  I  am  con- 
scious of  in  myself. 


CHAP.vn.  THE  COMMUNITY.  287 

Now,  regarding  this  sense  of  kind  two  questions  may  be 
asked,  (1)  How  is  it  arrived  at,  whether  gradually  or  by  a 
sudden  coup?  (2)  What  does  the  sense  of  kind  include? 
No  doubt  the  process  by  which  a  conscious  being  comes  into 
full  possession  of  the  sense  of  kind  is  ordinarily  very  grad- 
ual. A  multitude  of  small  circumstances  may  enter  into 
it,— plrysical  combats,  collisions  and  coincidences  of  move- 
ments, harmony  and  clash  of  objective  aims;  all  the 
multitudinous  affairs  of  life  in  fact.  It  will  be  influenced, 
too,  by  the  stage  of  conscious  development  which  the  social 
unit  has  reached.  In  the  puppy  it  will  be  more  physical 
and  more  purely  instinctive  than  in  the  child.  We  must 
bear  in  mind,  however,  that  we  are  dealing  here  with  a 
process  that  is  mainly  cognitive.  Not  kinship  itself,  but 
rather  the  means  by  which  we  become  cognizant  of  it,  is 
the  topic  here.  This,  as  we  know,  was  the  central  theme  of 
the  last  chapter,  and  we  are  only  enlarging  on  it  here  in 
order  to  accentuate  the  notion  of  process  and  the  multi- 
tudinous factors  that  enter  into  it.  Some  of  the  most  im- 
portant chapters  of  sociology  have  been  written  on  this  very 
topic.     But  here  it  is  incumbent  that  we  should  avoid  details. 

The  second  question  as  to  what  the  sense  of  kind 
includes  is  one  that  will  naturally  call  forth  more  debate. 
The  sense  of  kind  arises,  as  we  have  seen,  as  a  sense  of 
the  sameness  of  the  feeling-reactions  of  another  conscious 
unit,  with  our  own.  This  will  give  rise  to  the  sense  of 
community  of  conscious  interests  and  aims.  The  sense  of 
community  of  type  in  modes  of  feeling-reaction,  together 
with  the  ensuing  sense  of  community  of  conscious  interests 
and  aims,  will,  when  they  become  incorporated,  form  the 
developed  basis  of  sociality.  Let  us  consider,  then,  what 
this  ground-notion  of  sociality  includes  and  what  it  ex- 
cludes. We  have  seen  that  it  excludes  as  anti-social  the 
notion  of  completely  antagonistic  forces.  A  plurality  of 
conscious  units  completely  hostile  and  opposed  would  be 
incapable   of   community;    would,    in   fact,   be   negatively 


288  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

opposed  to  it.  Again,  it  would  exclude  conscious  units 
that  have  no  points  of  likeness  in  their  nature.  Such 
units,  while  not  actively  hostile,  would  be  simply  non- 
social.  Again  it  is  clear  that  sociality  would  exclude  a 
condition  where  the  sympathetic  and  antipathetic  forces 
were  exactly  balanced,  for  here  we  would  have  a  situation  in 
which  nothing  could  take  place.  But  here  exclusions  must 
end.  We  cannot  construe  the  notion  of  sociality  in  such 
a  way  as  to  exclude  antipathetic  and  antagonistic  forces. 
These  are  inherent  in  the  life  of  sociality  and  are  necessary 
in  order  to  relieve  the  social  situation  from  monotony  and 
boredom.  The  notion  of  sociality  only  requires  that  the 
antipathetic  and  antagonistic  forces  shall  be  held  sub- 
ordinate to  those  of  sympathy  and  organization.  It  is  just 
in  this  connection  I  would  venture  a  criticism  on  the 
work  of  Professor  Giddings.  In  denning  the  sense  of 
kind  as  the  fundamental  category  of  sociology,  Giddings 
deems  it  necessary  to  segregate  it  from  certain  economic 
and  other  forces  with  which  it  is  thought  to  be  antagonistic. 
This  seems  to  me  to  entail  an  undue  contraction  of  the 
social  field,  which  if  enforced  would  be  bad  for  both 
sociology  and  the  excluded  phenomena.  I  believe  a  more 
adequate  psychology  (or  shall  I  say  logic?)  would  lead  to 
a  conception  of  social  identity  that  would  not  exclude  differ- 
ence, just  as  a  true  organism  involves  differentiation  as  well 
as  integration.  My  social  other  need  not  be  an  exact  dupli- 
cate of  myself.  He  is  my  other  in  the  sense  of  being  in  some 
way  different  from  me.  My  social  other  is  such  because  I 
am  interested  in  him,  and  I  am  interested  in  him  because  I 
find  a  being  whose  feeling-reactions  upon  the  world  are  like 
my  own  in  species.  But  it  is  overstating  the  case  for  same- 
ness of  species  to  say  that  it  involves  identity  without 
difference.  Were  it  so,  then  what  I  am  interested  in,  in 
my  social  world,  is  the  discovery  in  my  others  of  exact  dupli- 
cates of  myself.  But  I  am  conscious  of  desiring  no  such  thing 
On  the  contrary,  I  recoil  from  it  as  from  a  condition  of  mon- 
otony and  boredom.     The  sense  of  kind  must  be  construed, 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  289 

rather,  as  an  identity  that,  as  the  logicians  say,  realizes 
itself  in  and  through  difference.  It  must  at  least  be  con- 
sistent with  difference.  Now,  social  difference  is,  of  course, 
difference  of  feeling-reaction,  and  this  will  involve  differ- 
ence and  antagonism  of  interests  and  aims.  The  only 
alternative  excluded  here  is  that  of  total  difference,  which 
would  mean  the  anti-  or  non-social.  But  anything  short 
of  total  difference  may  be  included  in  a  concept  of  so- 
ciality. We  cannot  reject  ordinary  differences  and  con- 
flicts even  when  they  reach  the  gravity  of  war,  as  non-social 
or  anti-social.  They  are  simply  features  of  the  broader 
play  of  social  forces  which  include  clashes  of  interests  and 
antagonisms. 

Taking  the  above  as  representing  more  adequately  the 
concrete  social  situation  I  think  it  will  enable  us  to  reach  a 
concept  of  social  activity  that  will  not  be  one-sided  or 
exclusive.  Let  us  take  as  an  illustration  of  the  complexity 
of  ordinary  social  movements  the  conflict  which  some- 
times arises  between  the  workingman's  desire  to  continue 
work  at  the  current  wages,  on  the  one  hand,  and  his  feeling 
of  sympathy  with  the  ends  for  which  a  strike  has  been 
ordered  and  his  fear  of  being  ostracized  as  a  scab  by  his 
companions,  on  the  other.  The  question  here  is  whether 
the  whole  situation  is  not  to  be  regarded  as  essentially 
social.  Take  the  more  distinctively  economic  motive,  the 
desire  to  keep  on  earning  wages.  This  may,  in  fact,  be; 
variously  related  to  the  wage-earner's  life  as  a  whole.  He 
may  have  a  family  to  support  and  may  respond  more 
strongly  to  this  phase  of  the  social  situation  than  to  any 
other.  He  may,  on  the  other  hand,  be  free  from  family 
ties  and  may  be  actuated  either  by  the  relatively  selfish 
desire  to  increase  his  hoard,  or  by  the  feeling  that  his 
personal  right  to  order  his  own  life  is  interfered  with  by 
the  strike-order.  Whatever  motive  we  ascribe  to  him, 
short  of  indifference  or  antagonism  to  the  interests  and 
well-being  of  his  whole  social  environment,  it  will  be  pos- 
sible to  show  how  his  conduct  may  be  subsumed  under  the 
19 


290  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

categories  of  sociality.  Let  us  suppose  his  motive  to  be  of 
the  more  personal  and  self -regarding  type.  It  will  not 
cease  to  be  social  by  virtue  of  the  fact  that  it  is  self -regard- 
ing. The  self-regarding  motive  and  conduct  may  be,  and 
doubtless  often  are,  socially  justifiable,  as  when  a  single 
individual  resists  the  tyranny  of  the  mob  in  defense  of  his 
personal  right  to  dispose  of  himself  or  his  labor.  It  is 
not  enough,  then,  to  determine  motive  or  conduct  as  self- 
regarding  in  order  to  exclude  it  from  the  pale  of  sociality. 
It  must  be  shown  to  involve  something  that  is  inimical  to 
the  social,  that  will  not  from  any  point  of  view  contribute 
to  social  organization  or  progress. 

Returning  now  to  the  illustration  of  the  worker  who 
stands  out  against  the  combined  action  of  his  fellows,  we 
may  say  that  he  is  not  thereby  proving  himself  anti-social. 
He  may  be  acting  under  a  broader  or  higher  social  ideal  in 
which  his  motive  and  conduct  are  included.  The  motive  and 
conduct  of  his  fellows,  who  are  now  his  enemies,  are  included 
in  the  social  ideas  of  their  class.  In  view  of  these  they  are 
social  and  organizing,  while  his  motive  and  conduct  are  anti- 
social and  disorganizing.  But  so  are  their  motive  and  con- 
duct in  view  of  his  broader  and  higher  social  ideal.  But  this 
conflict  of  ideals  will  be  mediated  by  an  ideal  that  is  more 
broadly  human  and  that  includes  the  partizan  difference 
which  divides  the  individual  wage-earner  from  his  class, 
under  a  broader  or  higher  category.  For  example,  they 
may  be  common  members  of  the  same  lodge  or  of  the  same 
state,  and  here  will  be  a  bond  that  transcends  the  plane  of 
the  difference  and  in  view  of  which  the  difference,  to  use 
a  Hegelian  term,  is  aufgehoben.  Only  when  the  motive  and 
conduct  of  the  individual  rebel  is  purely  and  abstractly 
selfish  is  it  inimical  to  sociality  in  any  form.  And  only 
when  the  motive  and  conduct  of  the  strikers  refuse  to  be 
aufgehoben  in  view  of  any  higher  social  ideal,  do  they 
become  iconoclastic  and  anti-social.  Thus  we  may  reason- 
ably call  anti-social  the  motive  and  conduct  of  those  labor- 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  291 

organizations  which  are  led  to  set  themselves  against  the 
state  and  to  attempt  to  override  the  common  law. 

Now  all  such  motive  and  conduct,  whether  their  bearers 
be  individuals  or  groups,  may  be  included  under  the  term 
selfishness,  and  selfishness  may  be  defined  as  the  disposition 
to  assert  particular  interests  against  interests  that  are 
higher  in  the  sense  of  being  more  general,  and  in  which 
the  particular  interests  are  included.  Thus,  in  the  order 
of  comprehensiveness,  the  welfare  of  the  state  outranks 
that  of  all  included  organizations,  and  these  in  striking  at 
the  state  are  really  aiming  a  blow  at  their  own  foundations. 
It  is  here,  I  think,  that  we  come  in  sight  of  a  rational 
principle  of  distinction.  It  is  not  all  difference  or  an- 
tagonism that  is  anti-social.  But  only  that  form  of  it 
which  falls  under  the  category  of  selfishness.  Only  that 
antagonism  which  takes  the  form  of  opposition  of  lower  and 
particular  interests  to  higher  and  including  interests  can 
be  regarded  as  anti-social.  And  the  reason  is  that  the  prin- 
ciple of  such  antagonism  is  hostile  to  social  organization  in 
general.  It  is  divisive  and  dissolving  and  leads  inevitably 
to  anarchy  and  social  chaos.  But  ordinary  differences, 
antipathies  and  antagonisms  give  rise  to  mere  partizan 
clashes  that  are  mediated  by  a  higher  social  principle  em- 
bodied in  the  interest  of  a  larger  and  comprehending  social 
group.  Thus  war  ordinarily  is  not  anti-social,  but  repre- 
sents mere  partizan  difference  which  is  mediated  on  some 
higher  plane.  War  only  becomes  anti-social  when  it  is 
loved  and  followed  for  its  own  sake. 

The  second  fundamental  concept  of  sociology  is  that  of 
the  social  medium.  In  determining  the  sense  of  kind  we 
have  been  dealing  with  the  social  atom,  the  individual,  the 
material  term  of  sociology.  But  the  science  deals  directly 
with  social  movements  in  a  medium  and  it  is  a  vital  ques- 
tion, therefore,  as  to  how  this  medium  is  to  be  understood. 
Regarding  this  medium  we  shall  ask,  (1)  for  its  conditions, 
(2)  for  its  constituents,  and  (3)  for  the  modes  of  social 
movement   which   develop    in   it.     The   conditions   of   the 


292  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

social  medium  are,  of  course,  first,  that  there  should  be  a 
plurality  of  social  units  which  have  developed  the  sense  of 
kind  as  above  interpreted.  The  social  world  is  analogous 
to  the  physical  in  that  it  presupposes  a  plurality  of  social 
atoms  as  the  condition  of  its  existence.  A  second  and  the 
most  distinctive  condition  of  the  social  medium  is  the 
existence  of  groups  of  social  units.  By  groups  are  not 
meant  mere  aggregates,  since  mere  aggregation  is  not  a 
social  category.  The  social  aggregate  is  a  group  of  social 
units  which  have  been  drawn  together  by  the  sense  of  com- 
mon nature  and  interests.  The  socially  endowed  individual 
thus  conditions  the  existence  of  the  social  group.  A  third 
condition  of  the  social  medium  is  the  interaction  of  the 
units  of  the  group.  The  lines  and  spheres  of  activity  of 
these  units  must  meet  and  touch  those  of  others.  And  this 
contact  cannot  be  merely  mechanical.  There  must  be  an 
interpenetration  of  spheres  through  the  cognitive  media  as 
already  indicated,  so  that  there  may  be  a  greeting  of  inter- 
ests on  the  plane  of  sympathy  and  antipathy.  In  short, 
we  must  presuppose  a  social  aggregate  in  which  both  the 
interrelations  and  reactions  among  the  individuals  are  of 
the  species  social.  We  shall  then  have  present  the  condi- 
tions of  the  social  medium. 

How,  then,  is  this  social  medium  constituted?  Let  us 
take  for  illustration  an  aggregation  of  stones  comprised  of 
broken  pieces  of  rocks  in  all  conditions  of  unhewn  rough- 
ness and  in  all  shapes,  and,  to  complete  the  analogy,  let  us 
endow  these  stones  with  a  capacity  for  interaction.  They 
will  thus  constitute  an  aggregate  of  interacting  units.  If 
we  observe  the  condition  of  this  aggregate  long  enough,  we 
will  begin  to  observe  two  species  of  change  setting  in 
and  progressing.  One  is  in  the  character  of  the  stones 
themselves.  Their  constant  rubbing  together  begins  to 
modify  their  form.  They  lose  their  jagged  edges,  become 
more  smooth  and  approximate  more  closely  to  the  uni- 
formity of  pebbles.  On  the  other  hand  we  observe  a  com- 
mon medium  of  sand  appearing  gradually  and  composed 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  293 

of  the  pulverized  parts  of  the  pieces  broken  off  in  the 
process  of  rubbing'  together.  This  sand  conies  in  the  end 
to  be  a  conspicuous  feature  and  to  constitute  the  common 
bed  or  medium  in  which  the  individual  stones  are  found. 
Now  this  common  bed  of  sand  may  be  taken  to  represent 
the  social  medium  which  has  its  rise  in  a  similar  way.  The 
individual  units  rubbing  together  in  the  interactions  of 
their  social  interests,  by  degrees  certain  parts  are  broken 
off  in  the  process  and  form  the  nucleus  of  a  common  fund. 
In  each  of  these  broken  bits  we  have  the  germ  of  a  common 
interest  that  has,  by  virtue  of  its  commonalty,  ceased  to  be 
the  exclusive  possession  of  any  one,  and  is,  therefore,  the 
common  conscious  possession  of  all.  Moreover,  this  beginning 
of  common  interest  expresses  itself  in  a  conscious  need  that 
is  common.  A  germ  of  public  sentiment  thus  comes  into 
existence,  and  around  this  is  organized  some  form  of  co- 
operative effort  which  has  for  its  aim  the  satisfaction  of  a 
community-interest.  This  co-operative  form  may  take  the 
direction  of  providing  and  improving  public  streets,  insti- 
tuting some  common  means  of  instruction,  organizing  some 
way  of  improving  public  health  or  of  beautifying  the  town. 
The  special  direction  of  the  movement  makes  no  difference 
here.  The  point  of  interest  is  that  it  springs  out  of  a 
common  motive  and  this  motive  is  no  longer  merely  individ- 
ual, but  has  its  place  in  a  common  social  medium.  A 
community-consciousness  of  individuals  has  come  into 
existence,  and  this  becomes  the  organ  and  bearer  of  public 
sentiment. 

To  this  social  medium  we  may  apply  the  term  Com- 
munal Mind,  and  we  may  carry  our  analogy  further  and 
designate  as  Communal  Intelligence,  the  means  by  which 
social  progress  is  secured,  while  to  the  conserving  social 
function  we  may  apply  the  term  Communal  Memory.  The 
truth  is,  such  terms  have  much  more  value  for  social  science 
than  the  biological  analogies  which  the  Spencer  school 
employs  so  extensively.  And  the  reason  is  not  far  to  seek. 
Social  activity  is  a  function  of  consciousness,  and  the  social 


294  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

medium  to  which  our  attention  has  been  called  is  a  con- 
scious medium.  But  the  social  medium,  the  common  con- 
sciousness which  the  community  develops,  is  the  analogue 
in  the  social  field,  of  the  protoplasm  of  the  biologist.  It 
is  the  social  tissue  or  matter  which  supplies  the  basis  of 
social  movement  and  organization.  Naturally,  then,  the 
form  of  the  movements  as  well  as  of  the  consequent  organi- 
zation will  be  of  the  psychic  and  conscious  type  and  the 
sociologist  will  find  the  most  vital  roots  of  his  science  in 
psychology.  A  caution  that  is  needed  here,  however,  is 
that,  in  employing  the  terms  communal  mind,  communal 
memory  and  the  like,  the  question  as  to  the  degree  of  reality 
that  is  to  be  ascribed  to  them  cannot  be  settled  offhand. 
Whether  the  community-consciousness  represents  anything 
but  a  common  mode  of  activity  on  the  part  of  the  individual 
consciousnesses  of  the  social  units  is  a  question  that  must  be 
settled  on  its  own  merits. 

To  the  consideration  of  this  question  we  pass  imme- 
diately. We  have  spoken  of  the  social  medium  as  the 
gradual  product  of  the  accretions  from  the  interactions  of 
the  social  units  in  a  group,  and  this  medium  we  have  named 
the  communal  consciousness.  Now  this  result  is  valuable 
provided  we  are  not  misled  by  the  supposition  that  we  have 
been  employing  anything  more  than  a  material  analogy. 
The  social  units  are  not  pebbles,  nor  is  the  communal  con- 
sciousness a  body  of  sand.  The  social  units,  as  we  saw  in 
the  preceding  chapter,  are  selves,  and  the  purpose  of  that 
chapter  was  to  show  how  the  individual  self  becomes  also 
a  socius,  a  self  with  a  social  consciousness  that  responds  to 
a  social  other.  The  social  community  is  a  group  of  such 
units,  and  the  aim  of  the  doctrine  of  the  social  medium  is 
to  show  how  these  socially  endowed  individuals  develop  a 
communal  consciousness  which  constitutes  the  true  medium 
of  the  movements  that  are  distinctively  social.  What  we 
wish  to  determine  here  is  (1)  something  as  to  the  real 
nature  of  this  social  medium,  and  (2)  the  conditions  of  its 
development.     The  analogy  of  the  sand  has  value  as  bring- 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  295 

mg  out  one  important  feature  of  the  social  medium;  its 
commonalty,  or  what  recent  writers  call  its  publicity. 
But  it  does  not  shed  any  light  on  two  other  questions  which 
press  for  answer;  namely,  Of  what  kind  of  matter  is 
the  social  medium  constituted?  and  What  is  the  mode  of 
publicity  itself?  How  does  the  content  become  common? 
In  a  chapter  in  his  Social  and  Ethical  Interpretations, 
Baldwin  distinguishes  between  the  form  and  matter 
of  social  organization.  The  form  he  regards  as  imita- 
tion, while  the  matter  he  finds  to  be  purely  intellectual. 
The  materials  of  organization,  in  other  words,  are  the 
thoughts  of  the  social  units.  Social  progress  is  thus 
regarded  as  a  function  of  intelligence  as  distinguished 
from  will  and  feeling.  In  another  place  the  same  writer 
further  describes  the  thought  involved  as  the  ' '  self -thought- 
situation,"  meaning  the  social  unit's  idea  of  the  concrete 
situation  upon  which  it  reacts  in  some  form  of  social 
response. 

Now  if  the  writer  in  question  means  simply  by  this 
that  intelligence  must  take  the  lead  in  all  social  organi- 
zation, that  without  thought  no  social  progress  would  be 
possible,  then  I  can  agree  Avith  him  wholly.  The  position 
has  been  elaborately  developed  in  these  discussions  that 
all  conscious  activity  is  mediated  by  cognition,  and  that 
social  activity  is  mediated  by  a  special  form  of  cognition 
which  may  be  called  social.  But  in  the  chapter  on  The 
Matter  of  Social  Organization,  our  author  seems  to  make 
an  exclusive  claim  for  thought  which  I  find  myself  unable 
to  admit.  It  is  one  thing  to  give  the  primacy  to  thought 
in  the  field  of  social  movements,  and  quite  another  to  claim 
that  it  is  the  sole  factor  in  social  progress.  But  this  claim 
is  practically  made  when  thought  is  regarded  as  the  sole 
matter  of  social  organization.  The  objections  I  would  urge 
here  against  this  exclusive  claim  are:  (1)  that  it  ascribes 
to  the  intellect  an  efficiency  which  it  does  not  possess  in  the 
abstract.  For  thought,  even  when  we  translate  it  into 
terms  of  self-thought-situation,  can  have  no  power  of  a 


296  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

practical  character  apart  from  the  appeal  it  makes  to  the 
feelings  and  will.  And  it  is  only  when  the  emotional 
nature  leaps  forward,  as  it  were,  in  endorsement  of  the 
situation,  that  it  acquires  social  efficiency.  This  leads  to 
my  second  point,  (2)  namely,  that  the  matter  of  social 
organization  will  be  the  concrete  social  impulse  itself 
which  is  not  exclusively  intellectual  but  rather  a  practical 
movement  of  feeling  and  will,  informed  and  guided,  it  is 
true,  by  intelligence.  In  short,  we  cannot  see  our  way 
clear  to  any  other  conclusion  than  that  the  concrete  social 
motives  and  the  matter  of  social  organization  are  identical.1 
This  brings  us  back  again  to  the  general  question  of  the 
nature  of  the  social  medium.  The  matter  of  social  organi- 
zation is  reducible  to  the  concrete  reactions  of  the  communal 
consciousness  under  the  guidance  of  the  intellect.  If  the 
question  be  one  of  method,— how  the  social  reactions  are 
effected, — then  the  theory  of  imitation  supplies  the  answer. 
But  the  question  of  method  is  subsidiary  here  to  the  more 
fundamental  question  as  to  the  nature  of  the  social  move- 
ments themselves.  What  is  it  that  constitutes  a  movement 
social  and  thus  differentiates  it  from  movements  of  other 
species?  The  answer  has  already  been  partially  given.  A 
social  movement  will  be  a  function  of  a  social  self  in  view  of 
the  social  situation.  This  gives  its  form.  It  is  "a  self- 
thonght-situation. ' '  But  what  is  it  that  pulsates  in  this  form 
and  makes  it  alive?  It  is  something  that  interests  us,  that 
enlists  our  feelings  and  will  in  either  an  egoistic  or  an  al- 
truistic direction.  For  we  may  enter  sympathetically  or 
antipathetically  into  the  experience  of  another  being  like 
ourselves,  in  two  different  ways;  or  rather  in  one  concrete 
way  that  splits  into  vital  dualism.     Our  reaction  upon  our 

1  To  use  Baldwin's  own  figure,  if  we  take  a  cross-section  of 
any  progressive  social  movement  we  shall  find  it  to  be  internally,  a 
palpitating  pulse  of  will  and  feeling  informed  by  thought  or  idea ; 
that  is,  by  the  self-thought-situation.  To  this  I  am  able  to 
agree;  but  it  seems  to  me  to  be  different  from  the  statement  that 
the  matter  of  social  organization  is  purely  intellectual. 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  297 

first  experience  of  the  situation  may  be  dominantly  either 
egoistic  or  altruistic.  Our  social  action  may  be  determined, 
in  other  words,  either  by  the  agreeableness  or  disagreeable- 
ness  of  the  other's  experience,  to  ourselves,  or  by  its  agree- 
ableness or  disagreeableness  to  the  other.  In  the  one  case  we 
hold  ourselves  aloof  from  the  other  and  act  egoistically.  In 
the  other  case  we  identify  ourselves  with  the  other  and  act 
altruistically.  If  we  suppose  this  experience  to  be  recipro- 
cal we  shall  be  in  a  position  to  realize  the  matter  or  spirit 
of  the  movement.  It  is  a  reaction  upon  a  formally  social 
situation  (we  may  call  it  a  social  cognition),  which  is 
determined  by  interest  of  feeling  and  takes  either  an 
egoistic  or  an  altruistic  form.  Let  us  call  this  the  genus 
of  our  definition;  what  will  constitute  its  differential 
This  leads  to  the  second  question  as  to  the  nature  of 
publicity  or  commonalty.  It  is  not  certain  at  the  outset, 
that  every  reaction  that  is  generically  social  will  be  able 
to  take  its  place  as  an  element  in  the  social  medium.  The 
reactions  between  a  and  o  may  be  so  private  that  they  will 
fail  to  take  on  any  public  character.  AVhat  do  we  mean 
by  publicity?  If  we  take  the  reactions  among  social 
individuals  in  groups,  we  shall  find  that  some  of  them  will 
remain  private;  that  is,  however  vital  and  important  they 
may  be  to  a  or  b,  they  remain  the  property  of  a  or  b 
and  show  no  disposition  to  take  on  any  more  general  value. 
But  other  reactions  will  not  be  permitted  to  remain  in  this 
privacy.  They  will  be  selected  and  a  public  value  will  be 
stamped  upon  them.  It  will  be  found  that  the  principle 
of  selection  here  is  a  common  interest.  Some  interest  of 
a  or  b  turns  out  to  be  an  interest  of  all  the  social  individ- 
uals of  the  community,  or  at  least  of  a  controlling  num- 
ber of  them.  This  we  call  a  common  interest.  And  on  the 
basis  of  the  common  interest  will  arise  common  forms  of 
reaction.  If  the  common  interest  be  in  the  education  of 
children,  or  in  the  means  of  getting  from  place  to  place, 
this  interest  will  inspire  common  methods  of  education  and 
common  movements  toward  the  improvement  of  roads  and 


298  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

means  of  travel.  We  may  call  the  underlying  motive  an 
interest,  a  want,  a  demand ;  the  fact  remains  that  the  public 
action  is  a  function  of  the  public  interest  that  underlies  it. 

The  common  consciousness  that  constitutes  the  social 
medium  will  be  made  up  of  these  common  interests  and  the 
forms  of  activity  to  which  they  give  rise.  The  analogy  of 
the  pebbles  and  the  sand  will  enable  us  to  conceive  the 
nature  of  the  process  by  which  this  consciousness  develops. 
The  attrition  of  the  social  interests  and  actions  of  the  units 
of  the  group  will  lead,  through  the  principle  of  selection 
we  have  indicated,  to  the  suppression  of  the  movements 
that  are  not  fit  but,  on  the  other  hand,  to  the  survival  and 
propagation  of  those  that  rest  on  a  truly  general  interest. 
The  social  medium  will  be  thus  constituted  and  its  develop- 
ment will  be  due  to  the  operation  of  forces  which  we  now 
go  on  to  consider. 

What,  then,  are  the  conditions  of  the  development  of  the 
communal  consciousness?  This  leads  to  a  consideration  of 
what  we  may  call  the  social  forces.  We  are  not  con- 
cerned here  with  the  problems  of  social  evolution  and 
heredity.  These  belong  rather  to  the  history  of  organized 
social  movements.  We  are  seeking  here  the  factors  that 
enter  directly  into  the  constitution  of  the  communal  con- 
sciousness at  any  stage  of  social  evolution.  Now  I  appre- 
hend that  two  sets  of  forces  will  have  to  be  taken  into 
account  if  our  view  is  to  be  adequate,  (1)  the  individual 
forces,  (2)  the  forces  of  the  community  or  social  group. 
The  importance  of  the  individual  forces  will  be  underesti- 
mated only  by  those  sociologists  who  approach  the  study 
of  social  phenomena  exclusively  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
community.  Against  these  the  social  psychologists  have 
triumphantly  vindicated  the  importance  of  the  study  of 
the  social  nature  of  the  individual.  It  has  been  shown  that 
the  nature  of  the  social  units,  the  character  of  the  social 
medium,  and  even  the  form  of  the  movements  which  we 
call  social,  can  be  determined  only  from  the  standpoint  of 
the   psychologist.     Not   only  so,   but  the   social   processes 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  299 

themselves  arising  as  they  do  in  connection  with  conscious 
material  are  all  reducible  ultimately  to  forms  of  conscious 
movement.  Thus  if,  with  a  whole  school  of  sociologists,  we 
find  in  the  principle  of  suggestion  the  law  of  the  activity 
of  social  masses,  we  are  immediately  driven  back  to  the 
psychology  of  the  individual  for  our  doctrine  of  suggestion. 
Again  if,  with  another  school,  we  found  on  sympathy,  our 
psychology  of  the  individual  is  brought  once  more  into 
requisition.  Much  more  clearly  is  the  dependence  of 
sociology  on  psychology  apparent  when  we  essay  to  use 
such  terms  as  communal  mind,  communal  memory  and  the 
rest,  which  would  be  mere  empty  analogies,  without  a  con- 
crete psychological  filling.  The  function  of  individual 
social  forces  is  so  important  and  fundamental  that  the 
temptation  of  the  sociologist  who  approaches  his  task  from 
the  ground  of  the  psychologist  is  to  regard  sociology  merely 
as  an  enlarged  psychology.  It  is  this,  in  fact,  in  one 
whole  aspect  of  it,  and  the  psychologist  is  not  to  be  too 
severely  blamed  for  magnifying  his  function.  Secondly,  the 
communal  forces.  There  is  another  side,  however,  from 
which  it  becomes  clear  that  social  phenomena  cannot  be 
regarded  as  the  unmodified  products  of  individual  social 
forces.  We  have  already  seen  how  publicity  arises  as  the 
function  of  a  common  interest  which  leads  to  common 
modes  of  action.  It  was  tacitly  assumed,  however,  that  the 
commonalty  of  the  interest  arose  out  of  the  equating,  as  it 
were,  of  individual  interests.  Various  a's  and  b's  find 
that  they  have  the  same  interests  and  some  of  these  prove 
to  be  co-extensive  with  the  social  group.  They  thus  become 
separated  off  as  common  community  interests.  But  this 
assumption  is  now  recalled  as  inadequate.  What  we  must 
add  is  the  fact  that  the  group  itself  supplies  a  basis  for 
new  interests  that  would  not  otherwise  arise.  We  have 
seen  already  how  the  representation  of  the  social  situation 
precedes  and  mediates  all  social  reactions.  Here  we  have 
simply  to  extend  the  application  of  the  principle  so  as 
to  include  among  the  intellectual  media  what  we  shall  call 


300  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

the  idea  of  the  social  group  as  a  whole.  This  would  not  be 
identical  with  the  ordinary  form  of  individual  social  repre- 
sentation, that  of  the  self  as  related  in  specific  ways  with 
social  others.  The  idea  of  the  group,  a  plurality  of  socially 
reacting  social  units  as  a  whole,  now  becomes  the  fruitful 
element  in  the  representation.  The  social  consciousness 
finds  the  community  as  a  whole,  as  thus  presented  to  it,  an 
interesting  object  and  its  interest  calls  forth  reactions  in 
the  ordinary  way.  Thus,  for  example,  civic  pride  and 
patriotism  arise  and  are  the  motives  of  forms  of  social 
activity  that  could  not  be  stimulated  by  individual  social 
interests. 

We  must,  then,  include  the  community  itself  as  one  of 
the  forces  that  lead  to  the  development  of  the  social 
medium.  But  in  ascribing  to  the  community  the  function 
of  creating  new  interests  and  forms  of  reaction  we  have  not 
completely  exhausted  its  agency.  The  group  of  sociologists 
who  found  on  suggestion  have  developed  as  their  funda- 
mental principle  what  they  call  the  law  of  heightened 
suggestion,  which  is  simply  a  formal  statement  of  the  fact 
that  a  crowd  of  individuals  is  more  susceptible  to  the 
influence  of  ideas  or  feelings  than  would  be  any  of  the 
individual  members  when  isolated.  The  massing  of  social 
units  thus  seems  to  have  an  effect  analogous  to  that  of  add- 
ing fuel  to  a  fire  that  is  already  burning.  The  value  of  this 
law  for  sociology  may  not  be  so  great,  however,  as  its  invent- 
ors are  disposed  to  think.  It  is  thought  by  some  to  represent 
a  law  of  social  hypnotism  which  takes  it  out  of  the  field  of 
normal  sociality.  The  sober  student  of  social  phenomena  will 
not  fail,  I  think,  to  make  a  distinction  between  the  idea  of  a 
social  community  and  that  of  a  mob;  for  the  social  com- 
munity is  one  that  is  moved  and  conserved  by  a  complexity 
of  motives  and  interests  which  supply  restraints  as  well  as 
incentives,  whereas,  the  mob  is  a  body  of  social  units  which, 
for  the  time,  have  forgotten  everything  but  the  one  over- 
powering impulse  under  which  they  are  acting.  The  mob's 
action  will,  therefore,  be  wholly  different  from  that  of  the 


ciiAP.vn.  THE  COMMUNITY.  301 

normal  social  community.  Perhaps,  however,  the  phrase 
"wholly  different"  needs  some  modification.  The  action  of 
the  mob  does,  in  one  respect  at  least,  shed  important  light  on 
the  forces  of  social  activity.  In  its  reduction  of  the  social 
situation  to  absolute  simplicity,  it  is  a  kind  of  substitute 
for  the  experiment  in  physics ;  it  presents  the  phenomenon 
of  the  unimpeded  operation  of  a  single  social  motive.  Now 
while  normal  social  movements  are  the  results  of  complex 
conditions,  so  that  the  movement  of  the  mob  cannot  be 
taken  as  a  type  of  normal  social  action,  it  still  presents 
to  the  student  of  sociology  at  least  two  points  of  interest 
and  value.  In  the  first  place,  it  enables  him  to  see  more 
clearly  that  the  law  of  heightened  suggestion  does  operate 
in  all  social  aggregates,  and  that  while  in  most  cases  its 
force  is  checked  by  complexity  and  opposition,  yet  we  have 
here  an  example  of  what  it  actually  accomplishes  when 
unimpeded  and  of  what  it  tends  to  produce  and  actually 
effects  in  a  greatly  modified  form  in  the  ordinarily  social 
situation.  In  short,  the  law  of  heightened  suggestion  may 
be  taken  as  true  and  as  of  universal  application  if  it  be 
regarded  as  simply  a  statement  of  tendency  and  not  of 
actual  fact.  One  of  the  effects  which  the  aggregation 
of  individuals  produces  on  the  individuals  themselves  is 
this  general  heightening  of  their  spontaneity  and  the  con- 
sequent tendency  to  yield  more  readily  to  suggestion. 
Another  point  of  interest  and  value  is  the  bearing  which 
this  law  has  on  publicity  itself.  The  essence  of  publicity 
is,  of  course,  commonalty ;  when  a  thing  has  become  public 
property  exclusive  individual  possession  has  lapsed  and 
all  share  in  it  alike.  We  have  seen  that  the  tendency  in 
the  community  is  toward  the  development  of  these  ele- 
ments of  publicity  or  common  possession.  Now  it  is 
obvious  that  the  tendency  of  the  law  of  heightened  sug- 
gestion will  be  toward  the  development  of  this  commonalty. 
For  the  social  possession  of  things  in  common  involves 
the  consciousness  of  community.  But  this  consciousness 
may  be  only  half -developed  in  a  community  or  nation  and 


302  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

it  may  require  the  shock  of  a  common  calamity,  say  of  war, 
to  rouse  the  feelings  of  the  members  to  a  point  where  they 
flow  together  into  a  common  stream  and  empty  themselves 
in  some  spontaneous  movement  of  the  community  as  a 
whole.  Thus  the  consciousness  of  community  and  of 
nationality  becomes  fully  developed.  We  may  say,  then, 
that  the  law  of  heightened  suggestion  is  a  real  law  of 
tendency  and  that  it  has  an  important  bearing  on  the 
development  of  that  form  of  publicity  which  consists  in 
the  sense  of  community.  It  also  marks  a  distinction,  as 
we  have  already  noted,  between  the  movements  of  individ- 
ual social  units  and  these  same  units  when  acting  under  the 
sense  of  community.  The  law  of  heightened  suggestion, 
while  it  cannot  be  called  a  leveling  down  tendency,  inas- 
much as  the  motive  of  it  may  be  either  the  noblest  or  the 
most  base,  does  in  fact  contribute  to  a  lower  form  of  move- 
ment. But  it  does  this  by  raising  the  level  of  spontaneity 
and  thus  encroaching  on  the  territory  of  reflection  and 
deliberation.  In  the  community  as  well  as  in  the  individ- 
ual, reflection  is  the  condition  of  forms  of  activity  which 
rise  above  spontaneity.  The  individual  will  be  socially 
developed  just  in  proportion  to  the  dominance  of  reflection 
over  spontaneity.  This  is  also  true  of  the  community. 
But  the  difference  we  wish  to  mark  here  is  this,  that  the 
community,  qua  community,  will  be  found  to  be  more 
completely  under  the  dominance  of  spontaneity  than  is  the 
individual  and  that  this  difference  is  due  to  the  operation 
of  the  law  in  question. 

AVe  find,  then,  that  the  forces  which  underlie  and  con- 
stitute the  communal  consciousness,  or  as  it  has  been  called, 
the  social  medium,  are  both  individual  and  communal. 
The  individual  forces  will  account  for  all  the  elements  of 
publicity  up  to  the  point  where  the  idea  of  the  community 
itself  enters  in.  This  idea  of  community,— or  if  we  do  not 
like  the  term  idea,  this  sense  of  the  community  as  a  whole,— 
becomes  the  bearer  of  certain  community-interests  which 
the  social  individual  did  not  feel,  and  these  in  turn  give 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  303 

rise  to  forms  of  community-action.  The  development  of  the 
communal  consciousness  and  the  organizing  movements  to 
which  it  gives  rise  are  thus  conditioned  by  the  two  sets  of 
forces. 

We  have  seen  that  certain  social  forces,  individual  and 
communal,  enter  into  the  constitution  and  development  of 
the  communal  consciousness.  The  question  now  comes  up 
as  to  what  these  social  forces  are.  How  are  they  to  be 
represented?  The  group  of  thinkers  who  emphasize  the 
law  of  heightened  suggestion  also  tend  to  reduce  the 
social  forces  generally  to  the  form  of  thoughtless  impulses. 
The  action  of  the  mob  stands  to  them  as  the  type  of  social 
action  in  general.  At  the  opposite  extreme  we  find  those 
who  tend  to  put  exclusive  emphasis  on  reflection  and  the 
movements  of  thought.  Now,  important  as  the  intellectual 
factor  undoubtedly  is,  I  cannot  but  think  that  a  doctrine 
that  restricts  the  matter  of  social  organization  to  thought, 
sins  by  leaving  out  of  view  important  elements  of  con- 
tent. Thought  itself  never  supplies  social  motive.  It 
may  present  a  situation  that  appeals  to  some  form  of 
practical  interest,  but  the  social  motive,  or,  as  we  may  call 
it,  the  social  motor-idea,  will  be  the  concrete  pulsation  that 
arises  out  of  the  feeling-impulse  and  the  representation  by 
which  it  is  mediated.  This  will  be  the  term  that  will 
embody  the  social  experience.  If  we  attempt  to  isolate 
the  intellectual  element  in  the  experience  from  its  prac- 
tical connections  we  reduce  it  to  an  abstraction  and  destroy 
its  power  to  produce  social  effects.  The  older  thinkers  of 
our  era,  such  as  Hobbes,  Spinoza  and  Hume,  found  the 
socially  efficient  forces  in  the  feelings,  or  passions  as  they 
called  them,  and  their  tendency  was  to  regard  these  as  dis- 
tinct from  the  intellect,  so  that  a  kind  of  dualism  between 
thought  and  the  feelings  was  the  result.  Thus  Spinoza 
teaches  that  man  is  naturally  the  slave  of  his  passions, 
which  determine  his  actions  with  mathematical  certainty. 
This  servitude  is  only  broken  when  reflection  has  trans- 
lated the  passion  into  a  clear  idea.     The  mathematical  cer- 


304  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

tainty  of  the  result  remains,  but  an  idea-determined  action 
is  free  and  man  thus  breaks  the  bonds  of  his  slavery.  We 
have  seen,  moreover,  how  the  intellect  and  feeling  coalesce 
in  the  concrete  social  movement.  If  we  take  a  social  move- 
ment in  its  concreteness  we  shall  find  that  it  is  volitional 
in  its  form,  while  in  its  content  or  matter,  it  is  either 
a  thought-informed  feeling  or  a  feeling-saturated  thought. 
In  all  cases  there  is  the  implication  of  the  emotional  with 
the  intellectual.  And  this  gives  rise  to  a  force  to  which, 
when  it  has  received  the  stamp  of  social  normality,  the 
name  social  sentiment  may  be  applied.  We  prefer  this 
term  sentiment  because,  while  it  stands  for  the  synthesis  of 
feeling  and  intellect,  it  is  also  broad  enough  to  include  all 
that  body  of  beliefs,  convictions,  predilections  and  preju- 
dices which  constitute  in  every  community  a  large  part  of 
the  motor-forces  of  its  social  life. 

Up  to  this  stage  of  our  discussion  we  have  been  dealing 
almost  exclusively  with  what  may  be  called  the  concepts 
of  sociality;  with  the  nature  and  the  conditions  of  the  rise 
and  development  of  the  social  and  communal  consciousness. 
We  turn  now  to  the  social  movements  themselves  with  a 
view  to  determining  their  nature.  By  social  movements 
we  mean  the  phenomena  presented  by  the  life  of  com- 
munities, or,  as  we  may  call  them,  societies  What  phe- 
nomenal phases  does  the  life  of  communities  present  to 
the  sociologist?  There  are  at  least  two  of  these  that  are 
vitally  important.  In  the  first  place,  if  we  attend  to  the 
form  of  social  activity  we  shall  find  that  it  embodies  itself 
in  certain  communal  functions  which  in  their  exercise  lead 
to  the  development  of  certain  forms  of  organization.  Thus, 
to  take  the  threefold  division  of  functions  into  those  of 
sustenance,  defense  and  education,  we  find  not  only  the 
development  of  these  functions,  but  also  of  forms  of  social 
organization,  to  serve  as  their  instruments  or  organs.  We 
thus  reach  the  threefold  classification  of  communal  func- 
tions and  organs,  made  by  the  Germans,  into  the  Nehrstand, 
the  Wehrstand,  and  the  Lehrstand.     Doubtless  the  three 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  305 

most  fundamental  social  functions  are  those  of  nourish- 
ment, defense  and  education.  This  gives  rise  to  the 
economic,  military  and  educational  activities  of  the  modern 
state.  But  there  are  other  motives,  almost  as  fundamental, 
arising;  out  of  man's  spiritual  nature,  for  religion  and 
religious  organization;  out  of  his  aesthetic  nature,  for  lit- 
erature and  art  including  architecture ;  out  of  his  intel- 
lectual nature,  giving  rise  to  science  and  philosophy  and 
the  organized  means  for  the  pursuit  of  knowledge.  This 
is  a  phase  of  social  movement  that  has  been  treated  inter- 
estingly by  the  school  of  Herbert  Spencer  under  the  guid- 
ance of  biological  analogies.  What  we  have  called  the  com- 
munal consciousness  is  symbolized  as  social  tissue  and  this 
tissue  is  represented  as  developing  social  organs  corre- 
sponding to  those  of  the  living  organism.  Now,  while  the 
biological  analogy  is  no  doubt  valuable  in  the  sphere  of 
social  phenomena,  the  criticism  to  which  this  school  is  open 
arises  in  view  of  their  disposition  to  overwork  the  analogy 
of  the  living  organism  and  to  give  it  a  too  literal  applica- 
tion. Mr.  Spencer  himself  recognizes  the  social  as  belong- 
ing to  what  he  calls  the  superorganic,  but  this  does  not 
restrain  him  from  a  very  sweeping  as  well  as  literal  appli- 
cation of  biological  analogies  to  social  movements.  The 
social  is  superorganic  in  two  very  important  senses.  In  the 
first  place,  the  social  unit  is  a  socius;  he  is  not  only  con- 
scious, but  has  a  consciousness  of  his  other.  By  virtue  of 
this  other-including  consciousness  his  activities  transcend 
strictly  organic  movements.  In  the  second  place,  the  move- 
ments of  society  are  functions  of  the  communal  conscious- 
ness which,  as  we  have  seen,  has  for  its  basis  the  whole 
community  and  which  develops  directly  out  of  itself  the 
normal  functions  of  communal  and  national  life.  The  fact 
that  social  movements  are  phenomena  of  an  organism- 
transcending  consciousness  removes  them  so  far  from  the 
organic  sphere  as  to  render  the  legitimate  application  of 
biological  analogies  to  social  functions  extremely  limited. 

The  second  phase  of  interest  to  the  sociologist  is  that  of 
20 


306  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

the  growth  or  development  of  social  organisms.  Social 
phenomena  have  a  genetic  aspect  and  in  the  order  of  time, 
societies,  nations  and  civilizations  present  the  phenomenon 
of  development.  Here  also  the  too  literal  application  of 
biological  analogies  has  worked  mischief.  For  while  it  is 
no  doubt  true  that  human  society  has  passed  through  the 
phases  of  an  evolution,  and  while  it  is  true  also  that  society 
is  able  to  conserve  its  results  by  some  principle  of  heredity, 
yet  both  these  processes  must  be  determined  in  view  of  the 
essential  nature  of  society  itself.  Now,  the  essence  of  the 
social  nature  is  consciousness  and  its  differentia  is  com- 
monalty or  publicity.  If  we  conceive  a  consciousness 
whose  interests  and  forms  of  movement  are  public  in  their 
character,  then  we  have  truly  apprehended  the  essential 
nature  of  what  we  call  a  social  community  or  society.  No 
doubt  the  social  units  are  also  biological  units,  which,  as 
such,  are  subject  to  the  laws  of  biological  evolution.  And 
this  will  also  have  an  indirect  effect  on  the  social.  But 
what  we  are  concerned  with  here  is  the  phase  of  the  develop- 
ment that  is  distinctively  social. 

Having  thus  limited  the  question,  it  is  clear  that  all  the 
forces  of  social  evolution  must  operate  through  conscious- 
ness. They  must,  in  other  words,  take  the  form  of  conscious 
motors.  The  social  unit,  in  order  to  be  socially  moved,  must 
be  approached  through  its  social  consciousness,  and  a  com- 
munity, in  order  to  be  socially  moved,  must  be  approached 
through  its  public  or  communal  consciousness.  Our  fruitful 
analogies  here  will  come  from  genetic  psychology  rather  than 
from  biology.  For  just  as  genetic  psychology  shows  how,  in 
the  two  processes  of  accommodation  and  habit,  the  individual 
progresses  and  secures  the  results  of  his  progress,  so  in  the 
social  field  the  sociologist  will  find  analogous  processes  at 
work.  The  social  accommodations  leading  to  the  develop- 
ment of  the  communal  consciousness  by  the  addition  of  new 
material,  while  the  operation  of  habit  will  simply  be  that  se- 
lective function  of  the  community  by  virtue  of  which  some 
of  this  new  material  will  be  stamped  with  publicity  and  will 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  307 

take  its  place  as  an  element  in  the  social  medium,  while  the 
rest  will  be  suppressed.  In  the  life  of  society  as  truly  as 
in  that  of  the  individual,  this  double  process  will  be  found 
to  be  going  forward.  Now  when  we  seek  further  to  deter- 
mine the  modus  of  social  evolution,  we  find  that  the  whole 
movement  is  conditioned  by  the  occurrence  of  variations. 
The  increments  wTe  spoke  of  as  resulting  from  social 
accommodations  are  not  mechanically  achieved.  We  must 
bear  in  mind  that  the  social  movement  is  a  movement  of 
consciousness,  and  that  consciousness  can  overflow  its  banks 
only  by  conceiving  some  new  situation.  This  will  not  be  a 
function  of  the  community,  but  generally  of  some  individual 
member.  The  newT  situation  he  conceives  will  stand  for  a 
variation,  and  it  will  be  simply  a  signal  for  that  dual  process 
of  social  accommodation  and  habit  on  the  part  of  the  com- 
munity which  will  lead  to  its  adoption  or  rejection.  If  the 
variation  be  conserved,  wre  shall  have  a  step  in  social  prog- 
ress, either  of  advance,  change  of  direction  or  increase  of 
complexity.  Baldwin  has  pointed  out  more  clearly,  per- 
haps, than  any  other  writer  in  this  field,  how  the  social 
variation  will  always  in  the  first  instance  be  the  function  of 
some  individual.  The  innovating  individual  takes  his 
chances,  like  any  other  variation,  of  being  suppressed,  or  of 
having  his  proposed  reform  rejected.  Whether  society 
adopts  or  rejects  the  variation  will  depend,  of  course,  in  part 
on  the  susceptibility  of  the  social  organism  itself  to  new 
changes,  and  in  part  on  the  character  of  the  proposed  in- 
novation. 

Social  evolution  will  show  itself  in  a  growing  com- 
plexity of  function  and  organ  and  in  the  forward  move- 
ment of  society,  as  a  whole  toward  the  realization  of  higher 
ideals.  Of  course,  we  are  to  avoid  the  identification  of 
social  evolution  with  mere  social  change.  Mere  change  is 
not  progress.  A  change  may  not  be  a  variation  at  all,  and 
if  it  is,  it  may  be  one  of  those  variations  that  are  destined 
to  be  suppressed.  Social  evolution  is  the  movement  which 
arises   out   of   the   selection   and   conservation   of   fruitful 


308  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

variations.  But  evolution  would  not  be  possible  were 
there  not  some  way  of  rendering  its  results  permanent. 
We  have  seen  in  dealing  with  social  evolution  that  the 
biological  analogies,  in  order  to  be  applicable,  must  be 
greatly  modified.  This  is  even  more  the  case  when  we 
come  to  deal  with  such  a  topic  as  social  heredity.  We 
found  that  social  evolution  is  indirectly  influenced  by 
biological  evolution.  But  social  heredity  breaks  away  al- 
most wholly  from  the  biological  analogy.  It  is  purely  super- 
organic  in  its  character.  How,  then,  are  social  results 
made  permanent?  In  the  first  place,  there  is  no  evidence 
that  any  permanent  increase  is  effected  in  the  native 
capacity  of  the  mind  of  the  individual.  We  cannot 
say  that  the  intellectual  or  social  capacity  of  the  modern 
infant  is  any  greater  than  was  that  of  the  ancient. 
Again,  in  social  heredity  there  is  no  question  of  the 
inheritance  of  congenital  or  acquired  characters.  The 
social  capacity  with  which  an  individual  is  born  into 
the  world  may  be  regarded  as  a  constant,  while  the  acquisi- 
tions of  the  individual  perish  with  him  and  would  be  lost 
were  not  social  heredity  different  from  the  principle  of 
biological  inheritance.  Now,  in  determining  what  social 
heredity  is  we  may  say  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
subjective  social  heredity.  It  is  purely  objective.  Where, 
then,  do  we  find  it?  Nowhere  else  than  in  the  body  of 
culture  that  is  contained  in  our  literature,  our  institutions, 
our  laws  and  customs,  our  buildings  and  architecture,  our 
science  and  educational  facilities  which  we,  as  one  genera- 
tion, leave  to  the  generation  that  follows.  The  social  unit 
not  only  inherits  its  individual  nature,  but  it  falls  heir 
also  to  the  stored-up  forces  of  its  social  environment. 

In  dealing  with  the  notion  of  social  heredity  it  will  be 
necessary,  in  the  first  place,  to  distinguish  it  from  the  social 
environment.  The  whole  outward  situation  of  the  social 
unit  is  made  up  of  two  elements,  (1)  the  social  individuals 
of  the  group  and  the  group  itself  with  its  present  com- 
munal  activities,    (2)    an   inherited   body   of   institutions, 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  309 

customs,  ideas  and  instruments  of  culture,  that  has  come 
down  from  former  generations.  The  former  is  the  en- 
vironment proper  with  which  the  social  unit  immediately 
interacts.  The  latter  is  its  heredity,  what  it  becomes 
possessed  of  by  inheritance.  There  can  be  no  ground  for 
dispute  between  Lamarckian  and  Weismannian  here,  for 
each  generation  may  add  to  the  inheritance,  and  what  it 
hands  down  will  be  composed  of  its  own  patrimony  plus 
what  it  has  added  by  its  own  efforts.  Only,  there  is  this 
great  difference ;  a  generation  may  squander  its  social 
patrimony  so  that  it  will  have  less  to  transmit  than  it  re- 
ceived. And  again,  the  new  generation  may  fail  to  enter 
into  its  hereditary  rights.  These  special  features  are  due 
in  part  to  the  nature  and  scope  of  social  selection.  This 
is  a  conscious  function,  as  we  have  seen,  and  furthermore, 
each  generation  exercises  it  not  simply  in  the  field  of  varia- 
tions, but  also  in  connection  with  its  social  inheritance.  To 
a  great  extent,  at  least,  the  social  patrimony  is  optative. 
Only  that  part  of  it  will  be  saved  and  transmitted  that  is 
selected  and  becomes  vital  in  the  life  of  the  new  genera- 
tion. Otherwise  the  world  would  still  possess  the  Alexan- 
drian library  and  the  historian  would  be  much  richer  in 
materials.  They  are  also  due  in  part  to  the  method  by 
which  a  generation  possesses  itself  of  its  patrimony.  If 
we  distinguish  the  social  patrimony  from  the  environment 
proper,  then  it  will  be  found  that  the  whole  hereditary 
endowment  may  be  subsumed  under  the  head  of  the  instru- 
ments of  culture,  and  that  they  can  be  made  available 
only  through  the  educative  function.  The  primary  office 
of  education  is  that  of  inducting  the  social  units  into  the 
rights  of  their  social  patrimony.  Only  when  they  have 
thus  caught  up  with  their  heredity  can  they  become  pro- 
ducers and  add  to  the  fortune  they  have  inherited. 

At  the  close  of  this  chapter  we  wish  to  devote  a  para- 
graph to  the  continuity  and  direction  of  social  progress. 
We  have  seen  that  the  conditions  of  progress  are  (1)  the 
power  of  accommodation  possessed  by  the  community,  (2) 


310  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

some  individual  who  proposes  a  variation  that  succeeds 
in  having  itself  selected.  As  to  continuity,  that  might 
seem  to  be  impossible  where  each  generation  has  so  large 
an  option  with  reference  to  its  patrimony.  There  is  a 
circumstance,  however,  which  renders  the  option  less  im- 
portant in  this  respect  than  it  seems  to  be  on  its  face,  and 
that  is  the  fact  that  the  generations  are  not  like  so  many 
lengths  of  a  rope  each  following  the  other.  They  overlap 
to  a  great  extent.  The  life  of  a  generation  represents  not 
the  whole  duration  of  the  life  of  its  members,  but  only  that 
part  of  it  which  the  average  member  lives  beyond  the 
period  when  the  life  of  the  average  member  of  the  preced- 
ing generation  ceases.  As  a  matter  of  fact  his  life  has  been 
overlapped  during  the  whole  period  of  his  youth  by  that 
of  the  parent  generation.  And  this  is  precisely  the  edu- 
cative period  of  his  experience.  We  may  define  education 
in  this  regard  as  the  means  by  which  a  passing  generation 
incorporates  the  vital  elements  of  its  own  culture  into  the  life 
of  the  generation  that  follows.  When  we  bear  in  mind  that 
in  civilized  communities  about  one-fourth,  and  that  the  most 
susceptible  part,  of  the  whole  natural  life  of  the  individual  is 
given  over  to  the  process  of  education,  its  vast  importance 
will  be  apparent.  This  alone  might  seem  to  provide  a  suf- 
ficient guarantee  of  continuity.  But  we  may  borrow  an 
analogy  from  biology  and  add  to  the  force  of  education  that 
of  the  substantial  identity  of  all  social  tissue.  By  social  tis- 
sue we  mean,  of  course,  the  social  nature  of  man  which  we 
have  found  to  be  a  common  nature  and  to  involve  uniform 
modes  of  reaction.  This  community  of  nature  would  doubt- 
less bring  about  a  certain  degree  of  continuity  from  genera- 
tion to  generation,  even  apart  from  the  influence  of 
education.  But  it  is  not  necessary  to  attempt  a  separate 
valuation  of  the  forces  inasmuch  as  they  always  act  in  con- 
cert and  are  found  to  be  sufficient  to  secure  the  degree  of 
continuity  necessary  to  social  progress. 

That  the  normal  direction  of  social  progress  will  be  in 
the  line  of  greater  complexity  need  not  be  argued.     The 


chap.  vii.  THE  COMMUNITY.  311 

development  of  organ  and  function  will  involve  the  pro- 
cesses of  differentiation  and  integration;  the  separation 
of  functions  will  be  accompanied  by  more  compact  and 
efficient  organization.  Mr.  Spencer  has  insisted  on  this 
almost  to  the  verge  of  tedium.  Less  attention  has  been 
paid,  however,  to  the  problem  on  its  subjective  side.  Here 
it  is  a  question  of  the  progress  of  social  motives.  We  have 
seen  that  sociality  is  at  first  largely,  if  not  exclusively,  a 
function  of  spontaneity.  But  the  tendency  of  sociality  is 
toward  a  reflective  stage,  or  at  least  toward  a  stage  in  which 
spontaneity  will  be  qualified  by  reflection.  When  men 
begin  to  think,  they  begin  also  to  act  deliberately  from 
motives  which  arise  in  reflection.  It  thus  becomes  possible 
to  inhibit  impulse  by  the  motives  of  deliberation.  Reflec- 
tion operates  by  simply  enlarging  the  situation  upon  which 
the  social  forces  react.  In  spontaneity  the  social  units 
react  egoistically  and  altruistically  according  to  their 
nature.  But  in  reflection  the  larger  situation  presented  is 
able  to  impose  its  inhibitory  veto  on  the  impulse  of  spon- 
taneity. The  natural  man  thus  feels  himself  under  re- 
straint and  the  possibility  of  deliberate  action  arises. 
Reflection  thus  accustoms  the  individual  to  the  operation 
of  restraints,  and  this  prepares  the  way  for  the  introduction 
of  the  higher  motives  of  ethics  and  religion.  The  law  of 
social  progress  in  the  sphere  of  motive  may  be  defined, 
then,  as  a  tendency  to  pass  from  a  stage  of  spontaneity  in 
which  action  proceeds  from  impulse  to  a  stage  of  reflection 
in  which  it  becomes  possible  to  postpone  impulse  and  to 
act  from  motives  arising  out  of  a  broader  view  of  the 
social  situation. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 


THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS. 


In  the  preceding  chapters  we  have  been  endeavoring  to 
determine  what  we  may  call  the  concepts  of  sociality..  If 
we  take  the  representation  as  a  whole,  as  it  has  been  worked 
out  in  these  chapters,  it  resolves  itself  into  two  leading  con- 
cepts; (1)  that  of  a  social  situation,  (2)  that  of  a  social 
process.  The  situation  is  resolvable,  in  the  last  analysis, 
into  a  plurality  of  socially  endowed  units  aggregated  into 
a  community  and  developing  forms  of  social  reaction. 
The  fundamental  relation  of  these  units  in  this  community 
is  that  of  interaction.  The  interactions  of  the  social  units 
give  rise  to  certain  modes  of  reaction  called  social,  and  of 
these  the  modes  that  receive  the  stamp  of  publicity  and  are 
selected,  constitute  forms  of  communal  activity.  It  is 
thus  that  social  functions  arise,  and  these  lead  to  the 
development  of  organs  appropriate  to  their  exercise.  Thus 
arise  the  institutions  of  society.  The  social  process  is  this 
activity  of  social  organization  conceived  as  a  progressive 
movement  in  time.  It  takes  the  form  of  social  evolution 
manifesting  the  phases  of  habit  and  accommodation,  selec- 
tion and  hereditary  transmission.  In  its  form  it  exhibits 
the  stages  of  a  development  from  simplicity  to  complexity, 
of  organ  and  function  and  also  a  tendency  upward  from 
the  level  of  pure  spontaneity  to  that  of  reflection  and 
deliberation. 

Let  us  now  return  from  our  analytic  endeavor  and  take 

312 


chap.  vhi.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  313 

a  view  of  the  situation  as  it  presents  itself  in  the  concrete. 
To  the  social  investigator  who  has  gone  through  the  pre- 
liminary analysis  necessary  to  determine  the  concepts  of 
his  science,  the  concrete  situation  will  present  itself  about 
as  follows.  He  will  find  a  social  community  or  groups  of 
social  communities  that  he  knows  by  analysis  are  resolvable 
into  pluralities  of  social  units  in  interaction,  manifesting 
the  phenomena  of  common  activities  and  these  taking  the 
form  of  progressive  movements  in  time.  He  will  thus  be  the 
spectator  of  progressive  social  movements  and  his  analysis 
will  have  enabled  him  to  connect  these  with  the  individual 
and  communal  forces  which  bring  them  into  effect.  And  his 
business  as  an  investigator  will  be  to  study  the  social  move- 
ments or  phenomena  in  connection  with  the  underlying 
forces  which  produce  them.  How  far,  then,  will  he  be  able 
to  deal  with  his  phenomena  under  the  rubrics  of  a  natural 
science;  and  if  there  be  a  natural  science  of  social  phe- 
nomena, to  what  extent  will  it  involve  a  modification  of 
the  concepts  of  science  as  they  apply  to  physics  and 
biology?  At  the  outset  of  such  an  inquiry  we  must  not 
forget  the  fundamental  doctrine  of  this  whole  treatise; 
namely,  that  the  phenomena  we  deal  with  in  any  field 
are  sjmibolic  effects  of  the  operation  of  underlying  and 
more  fundamental  forces.  The  social  movements  must  be 
regarded  as  functions  of  the  individual  and  communal 
forces  which  underlie  them.  Now  we  have  found  that 
the  fundamental  concept  of  natural  science  and  that 
which  determines  its  view  of  the  world  is  that  of  a  sys- 
tem of  phenomena  dynamically  connected  with  underly- 
ing substances  or  grounds.  The  dynamic  principle  by 
means  of  which  phenomena  are  thus  related  is  natural 
causation. 

In  dealing  with  the  application  of  this  principle  to 
biological  phenomena  we  found  that  the  internal  instability 
of  the  biological  units  precluded  quantitative  exactness 
and  rendered  only  a  qualitative  determination  possible. 
Again  we  saw  that  the  developing  character  of  biological 


314  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

phenomena  made  it  necessary  to  apply  the  principle 
genetically  rather  than  logically.  At  this  point  we  found 
some  good  authorities  denying  the  applicability  of  the 
principle  of  natural  causation  to  genetic  processes.  We 
saw,  however,  that  the  principle  when  stated  with  sufficient 
breadth  is  not  open  to  the  objections  urged.  The  sociolog- 
ical investigator  will  find  that  it  is  the  genetic  form  of 
causation  which  he  will  have  to  employ.  Let  us  get  our 
ideas  clear,  then,  as  to  what  the  genetic  notion  of  causation 
is.  The  principle  of  natural  causation  is  that  of  the 
dependence  of  the  phenomenal  effect  on  natural  conditions. 
That  the  cause  shall  be  adequate  to  the  effect,— that  is, 
sufficient  to  account  for  its  natural  rise,— is  a  universal 
requirement.  But  that  the  effect  shall  be  identical  with, 
or  the  equivalent  of,  its  cause  is  a  quantitative  requirement 
that  is  vital  in  physics  but  not  applicable  where  quantifica- 
tion is  not  attainable.  Abstracting  this  requirement  of 
quantity  the  qualitative  requirement  which  remains  is 
simply  that  the  cause  assigned  be  a  sufficient  statement  of 
the  natural  conditions  out  of  which  the  phenomenon  has 
emerged.  This  requirement  will  be  met  by  the  genetic 
judgment  a=fr  in  which  the  equality  sign  signifies  becomes. 
If  this  judgment  be  anything  more  than  a  mere  descriptive 
one  stating  a  fact,  that  is,  if  it  be  explanatory,  then  a  will 
represent  the  conditions  out  of  which  b  naturally  arises, 
so  that  our  judgment  may  be  stated  as  follows :  given  a  then 
b  will  arise.  Here  the  given  term  a  is  the  natural  causal 
condition  of  the  rise  of  b. 

If  we  once  become  clear  on  this  point  it  will  become 
obvious  that  natural  causation  is  the  principle  of  explana- 
tion throughout  the  realm  of  natural  science,  and  that 
where  it  breaks  down,  there  natural  science  comes  to  an 
end.  If,  then,  sociology  as  a  natural  science  be  a  science  of 
natural  causation,  it  is  open  to  ask  whether  the  difference 
between  social  and  biological  material  may  not  make  a 
further  modification  in  the  form  of  its  application  neces- 
sary.    AVe   are   prepared   to   answer  this   question   in   the 


ciiAP.vni.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  315 

affirmative.  The  question  how  far,  if  at  all,  consciousness 
shall  be  recognized  as  a  biological  factor,  is  yet  in  debate. 
At  all  events  even  though  consciousness  in  the  form  of 
purpose  should  be  admitted,  it  could  never  be  carried  so 
far  as  to  impose  on  biology  a  purposive  principle  of  ex- 
planation. In  other  words,  biology  would  still  remain  a 
natural  science  and  would  not  be  under  the  necessity  of 
substituting  the  principle  of  finality  for  that  of  efficiency. 
The  presence  of  consciousness  as  a  social  factor  is,  however, 
beyond  debate.  Not  only  does  consciousness  enter  as  a 
factor,  but  it  has  practically  the  whole  field  to  itself.  The 
social  agents  are  conscious  units.  The  social  forces  are 
conscious  and  act  from  conscious  motives.  The  social 
movements  are  the  phenomena  of  conscious  causes.  Why, 
then,  does  social  movement  not  fall  wholly  outside  of  the 
category  of  natural  causation,  into  that  of  finality?  The 
answer  will  appear  from  various  lines  of  consideration. 
In  the  first  place,  it  is  the  exceptional  social  movement  that 
is  altogether,  or  even  in  the  main,  the  result  of  prevision 
and  purpose.  The  majority  of  social  movements,  and  we 
may  say,  those  that  are  most  typical  and  representative,  are 
the  result  of  a  plurality  of  forces  in  which  prevision  and 
purpose  are  generally  to  be  included.  But  in  the  case  of 
these  movements  it  will  be  found  that  the  forces  of  spon- 
taneity enter  to  such  an  extent  as  to  take  the  movement 
as  a  whole  practically  out  of  the  sphere  of  prevision  and 
purpose.  The  case  of  the  late  Spanish  War  may  be  taken, 
I  think,  as  a  typical  example.  No  one  at  the  beginning  of 
that  war  could  have  possibly  foreseen  the  complete  revo- 
lution in  international  relations  which  it  was  to  bring 
about.  No  one  could  have  anticipated  the  most  vital 
consequences  of  the  war,  the  painful  complications  fallen 
into  by  a  species  of  accident,  the  result  of  which  has 
been  a  profound  revolution  in  national  sentiment  and  in 
the  policy  of  the  country.  No  one,  I  say,  could  have 
anticipated  this.  A  few  gifted  minds  may  have  had  some 
inkling  of  the  result  as  a  bare  possibility,  but  how  much 


316  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

had  this  to  do  with  bringing  about  the  result?  Such 
causes  were  ten  thousand  times  outweighed  by  the  blowing 
up  of  the  Maine  and  the  spontaneous  explosion  of  senti- 
ment to  which  it  gave  rise.  It  is  only  when  a  Bismarck 
stands  at  the  head  of  affairs  and  deliberately  plans  revolu- 
tions years  before  they  are  effected  that  we  have  a  social 
movement  that  clearly  transcends  the  category  of  natural 
causation.  In  this  case  while  natural  causes  co-operate, 
the  dominating  and  determining  force  is  the  will  and 
purpose  of  a  great  mind. 

Approaching  the  problem  from  another  point  of  view, 
it  is  the  case  in  general  that  social  movements  arise  indi- 
rectly out  of  the  interactions  of  the  social  forces.  The 
individual  purposes,  so  far  as  these  exist,  must  come  into 
interplay  with  the  purposes  of  other  individuals,  and  only 
those  will  be  selected  which  succeed  to  the  stamp  of  pub- 
licity. Now  the  purpose  that  receives  the  public  stamp  may 
not  be  that  of  any  single  individual.  The  individual  pur- 
poses may  all  have  failed  and  the  purpose  that  succeeds  may 
be  like  the  sand  that  constitutes  the  social  medium,  truly 
communal,  but  not  the  function  of  any  of  the  social  pebbles 
that  form  the  social  group.  If  we  add  to  this  the  tendency 
of  communities  to  be  more  completely  under  the  control  of 
impulse  than  are  individuals,  and  the  consequent  greater 
dominance  of  spontaneous  movements  in  the  social  medium, 
it  will  be  clear,  I  think,  that  the  ordinary  social  movement 
will  not  be  one  that  is  mainly  determined  by  prevision  and 
purpose. 

But  while  this  is  true,  it  must  also  be  admitted  that  the 
wills  and  purposes  of  the  social  units  play  a  very  important 
part  in  the  social  drama.  They  are  the  counters,  so  to 
speak,  whose  rubbing  together  exercises  an  important 
influence  in  the  development  of  the  communal  conscious- 
ness and  forms  of  communal  action.  We  saw  that  the 
instability  of  the  biological  unit  rendered  the  application 
of  quantitative  methods  in  biology  impracticable.  The 
presence  of  consciousness  in  the  social  unit  with  its  mingling 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  317 

of  spontaneity  and  reflection  renders  the  unit  of  sociology 
still  more  unstable  than  that  of  biology.  Consequently 
the  sociologist  will  be  unable  to  reach  results  which  will  be 
at  all  commensurate  in  accuracy  with  those  of  the  biologist. 
The  biologist  may  by  experimentation  overcome  to  some 
extent  the  instability  of  his  material,  but  the  scope  for 
scientifically  exact  social  experiment  is  necessarily  very 
circumscribed.  Yet,  if  we  allow  the  widest  scope  to  this 
instability,  the  student  of  social  movements  will  find 
that  they  are  still  calculable  and  that  the  principle  that 
brings  them  within  the  limits  of  social  explanation  is  one 
that  connects  them  with  their  natural  conditions.  The 
possibility  of  a  natural  science  of  social  phenomena  depends 
on  the  availability  of  judgments  of  the  genetic  type  which 
connect  social  antecedents  with  social  consequents  in  such 
a  way  that  the  subject  of  the  judgment  a  states  the  natural 
conditions  which,  when  given,  account  for  the  rise  of  1). 

But  in  saying  that  sociology  may  be  a  natural  science, 
we  do  not  wish  to  be  understood  as  claiming  that  social 
movements  may  not  rise  above  the  limits  of  natural  science. 
Our  belief  is  just  the  contrary,  that  there  is  a  tendency 
in  the  sphere  of  social  activity  to  transcend  the  limits 
where  a  natural  science  treatment  would  be  profitable. 
It  is  only  in  the  sphere  of  spontaneity  and  the  operation 
of  impulsive  and  unreflecting  forces  that  natural  science 
has  a  clear  field.  But  the  law  of  social  evolution  is  that  of 
progress  from  the  spontaneous  to  the  more  reflective.  Now 
we  are  prepared  to  deny  that  any  pure  phenomena  of 
reflection  can  be  profitably  treated  under  the  rubrics  of 
natural  science.  For,  a  movement  of  reflection,  if  it  be  a 
practical  movement,  will  be  one  that  is  determined  by 
reflective  motives,  that  is,  by  prevision  and  purpose,  and 
it  will  have  a  definitely  conceived  end  as  its  goal.  Such 
movements  fall  definitely  under  the  category  of  finality. 
There  is  a  tendency  in  social  development  toward  a  point 
where  the  motives  of  reflection  shall  be  dominant.  This 
tendency  is  exemplified  in  any  well-organized  community 


318  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

whose  citizens  are  exceptionally  intelligent  and  whose 
social  actions  are  determined  by  deliberation.  Such  a  com- 
munity presents  phenomena  which  it  would  be  utterly 
profitless  to  attempt  to  explain  by  the  ordinary  rubrics  of 
natural  science. 

We  say,  then,  that  w7hile  it  is  true  that  social  phenomena, 
taken  in  the  mass,  are  amenable  to  the  categories  of  natural 
science,  and  while  it  is  no  doubt  true  that  natural  science 
supplies  the  only  method  by  which  these  phenomena  in 
their  more  material  aspects  can  be  profitably  treated,  yet 
the  possibility  of  transcendence  is  to  be  found  in  the  very 
constitution  of  sociality.  There  can  be  no  sociality  where 
there  is  not  consciousness.  The  social  unit  is  a  conscious 
unit.  Now,  where  consciousness  is,  there  is  also  the  possi- 
bility of  reflection,  and  just  in  proportion  as  the  conscious 
unit  becomes  reflective  and  acts  from  the  motives  and  in 
the  forms  of  reflection,  to  that  extent  also  it  transcends  the 
limits  of  natural  science  and  comes  w7ithin  those  of  finality. 
The  same  is  true,  though  to  a  lesser  degree  realized,  in 
communities.  By  virtue  of  their  conscious  character  the 
social  community  has  the  capacity  to  rise  above  the  level 
ot  spontaneity  and  to  bring  its  public  conduct  under  the 
control  of  the  motives  of  reflection.  Where  intelligence 
controls  this  tends  to  become  the  case.  We  have,  then,  the 
phenomenon  of  a  community  that  in  its  conduct  has  passed 
beyond  the  limits  of  natural  science  into  that  of  prevision 
and  purpose.  The  conclusion  we  would  draw  from  the 
foregoing  is  that  reflection  marks  the  limit  at  wThich  the 
method  of  natural  science  ceases  to  be  applicable  to  social 
movements,  and  that  is  as  much  as  to  say,  that  deliberate 
action,  that  which  is  determined  by  thought  and  deliberate 
purpose,  is  of  such  a  character  as  to  transcend  the  principle 
of  natural  causation.  In  its  application  to  social  move- 
ments, however,  the  conclusion  requires  several  modifica- 
tions. In  the  first  place,  it  might  be  true  that  all  the  social 
units  of  the  groups  had  reached  the  stage  of  reflection  and 
deliberate  action  and  yet  the  movements  of  the  groups  as 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  319 

a  whole  might  not  be  dominantly  reflective.  We  have  seen 
that  community-action  tends  in  general  to  be  more  spon- 
taneous and  unreflecting  than  individual  action.  More- 
over, the  common  interests  which  make  up  the  body  of 
social  motives  have,  by  virtue  of  their  commonalty,  fallen 
into  the  category  of  the  habitual  and  are  likely  to  be 
accompanied  with  the  minimum  of  reflective  consciousness. 
In  general,  then,  social  activity,  in  practically  its  whole 
scope,  tends  to  conform  to  the  laws  of  the  habitual  in  the 
individual.  Again,  it  is  seldom  that  a  community  is  found 
to  be,  through  and  through,  under  the  influence  of  reflective 
motives.  This  higher  type  of  public  activity  will,  as  a 
rule,  be  confined  to  individuals  or  to  small  groups  within 
the  larger  communal  group.  And  it  w^ill  only  be  in  some 
great  public  crisis,  where  the  necessity  for  reform  has 
become  crying  and  a  campaign  of  education  is  entered 
upon,  that  the  community  as  a  whole  will  be  aroused  to 
thought  and  reflective  action.  Furthermore,  the  control 
of  the  reflective  social  forces  will  be  limited  in  both  space 
and  time.  Even  the  most  gifted  intelligence  is  unable  to 
comprehend,  much  less  control,  the  world-movements  as  a 
whole.  It  is  only  in  history  that  we  can  read  intelligently 
the  trend  of  the  world-movements.  Even  the  Bismarcks 
of  history  are  found  to  have  builded  either  more  wisely  or 
more  foolishly  than  they  knew.  And  this  is  because, 
however  comprehensive  and  sweeping  their  purposes  may 
have  been,  they  have  been  included  in  a  broader,  uncom- 
prehencled  sweep  that  has  led  on  to  unanticipated  things. 

For  the  above  reasons  it  will  be  found  true  generally 
that  social  movements  will  be  open  to  the  methods  of  natural 
science.  The  movements  that  rise  above  the  limit  will 
prove  exceptional,  and  even  these  exceptional  movements 
will  be  found  to  be  included  in  the  broader  sweep  of  forces 
which  completely  transcend  the  limits  of  foresight  and  pur- 
pose possessed  by  the  most  gifted  statesman  or  seer. 

What  place  and  function  shall  we  assign,  then,  to  the  re- 
flective forces  in  the  social  scheme  ?     The  pure  phenomenal- 


320  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

ist  will  tell  us  that  these  are  mere  bubbles  on  the  surface  and 
have  no  influence.  The  hide-bound  fatalist  will  tell  us,  on 
the  other  hand,  that  everything  has  been  predetermined  by 
the  inevitable  working  out  of  material  forces  and  that  reflec- 
tion is  simply  an  accompaniment  of  the  process  rather  than 
an  agent.  If,  however,  Ave  stand  by  the  fundamental  doc- 
trine of  this  whole  treatise,  we  shall  be  neither  pure  phe- 
nomenalists  nor  hide-bound  fatalists.  We  have  found 
that  consciousness  is  teleological  in  its  very  constitution 
and  that  it  is  only  the  stage  of  its  spontaneous  activity 
that  is  completely  open  to  the  method  of  natural  science. 
Keflection  which  translates  the  movements  of  conscious- 
ness into  terms  of  thought  and  deliberate  purpose,  by 
virtue  of  this,  lifts  it  also  above  the  limit  of  natural 
science  determination.  We  have  seen,  however,  that  the 
very  nature  and  scope  of  social  movements  are  sufficient  to 
keep  them  bodily  and  forever  in  the  sphere  of  spontaneity, 
where  at  least  the  controlling  forces  will  transcend  the 
thoughts  and  purposes  of  the  actors.  The  logic  of  the 
situation  is  on  the  face  of  it  disheartening  in  the  extreme. 
It  looks  as  though  the  pure  phenomenalist  and  the  hide- 
bound fatalist  were  after  all  in  the  right. 

But  let  us  not  make  haste.  We  have  been  forgetting 
something  of  importance.  Whether  we  be  libertarians  or 
determinists,  we  shall  at  least  recognize  the  fact  that  our 
thoughts  and  purposes  are  free  in  the  sense  of  not  being 
strictly  bound  to  the  car  of  habit.  We  are  able  to  think 
and  resolve  the  new  and  untried ;  that  is,  we  are  capable  of 
reflective  variation.  May  it  not  be,  then,  that  reflection 
finds  its  true  office,  socially  speaking,  in  this  business  of 
variation  ?  We  have  seen  that  the  social  group  is  not  only 
selective,  taking  simply  the  variation  that  will  fit  in  some 
way  into  its  habitual  life,  but  that  it  possesses  also  the  power 
of  accommodation.  It  may  assimilate  the  new  and  adapt 
itself  to  it.  Shall  we  not  say,  then,  that  the  great  business 
of  the  reflective  forces  is  to  suggest  variations?  And  inas- 
much as  reflection  is  itself  a  selective  activity  and  is  only 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  321 

satisfied  with  the  best,  shall  we  not  say  that  the  variations 
it  proposes  tend  to  take  the  form  of  social  ideals?  When 
we  think  of  it,  can  there  be  any  real  social  progress  without 
ideals  ?  Will  it  not  otherwise  prove  haphazard  and  run  to 
waste?  We  find,  then,  that  so  far  are  the  reflective  social 
forces  from  being  impotent  and  useless,  that  they  are  the 
fruitful  and  indispensable  sources  of  social  ideals.  They 
supply  the  social  consciousness  with  eyes  through  which  it 
is  able  to  see  that  which  never  'was  on  land  or  sea.'  They 
are  thus  indispensable  conditions  of  social  progress. 

Now,  it  is  in  this  phase  of  them  that  the  movements  of 
society  tend  always  to  transcend  the  methods  of  natural 
science.  The  spontaneous  forward-impelling  forces  of 
society  may  be  estimated  in  terms  of  natural  causation. 
But  what  value  has  such  a  principle  in  determining  the 
force  of  an  ideal  ?  In  its  very  nature  an  ideal  is  teleological 
and  final.  It  attracts  rather  than  impels,  and  its  whole 
force  depends  on  its  first  having  been  thought  or  con- 
ceived, and,  secondly,  on  its  being  elevated  into  a  purpose  of 
action.  It  then  becomes  a  principle  of  conduct  and  in- 
spires practical  activity. 

We  may  conclude  this  part  of  our  discussion,  then,  by 
saying  that  while  the  tendency  of  reflection  is  to  lift  the 
social  movements  as  a  whole  out  of  the  category  of  natural 
causation  and  bring  them  under  that  of  teleology  and  pur- 
pose, yet  as  a  matter  of  fact  owing  to  causes  that  have 
already  been  pointed  out,  this  tendency  never,  except  in 
isolated  and  restricted  instances,  realizes  itself  in  fact. 
Social  movements  as  a  whole  will  always  be  amenable  to 
the  methods  of  natural  science.  But  while  this  is  true, 
reflection  is  not  by  any  means  abortive,  but  it  is  its  function 
to  supply  those  social  ideals  without  which  social  progress 
would  be  impossible.  On  their  ideal  side,  then,  social 
movements  are  functions  of  reflection  and  are  no  longer 
amenable  to  the  methods  of  natural  science.  The  wise 
student  of  social  science  will  recognize  the  fact,  therefore, 
that  his  data  possess  an  aspect  of  transcendence. 
21 


322  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

Now,  it  is  through  the  medium  of  these  social  ideals 
that  the  synthesis  between  social  science  and  metaphysics 
is  to  be  effected.  We  have  seen  how  inevitable  and  how 
indispensable  the  social  ideals  are.  No  social  progress 
would  be  possible  without  them.  Let  us  ask  here  why  this 
is  so.  The  answer  will  be  found  in  the  fact  that  sociality 
is  a  function  of  consciousness ;  every  social  movement  is  a 
conscious  movement.  But  all  conscious  movements  that 
lead  to  any  fruitful  results  are  mediated  by  cognition. 
There  must  be  "the  self-thought-situation"  as  a  copy  and 
guide  of  activity.  This  is  especially  true  in  social  matters 
where  the  copy  is  necessary  in  order  to  bring  the  social 
other  within  the  limits  of  our  own  consciousness.  Cogni- 
tion is  necessary,  then,  as  a  constituent  of  social  activity. 
And  it  is  clear  that  cognition  will  be  the  suggesting  source 
of  variation  in  the  sphere  of  spontaneous  social  activity: 
that,  in  short,  it  will  present  the  ideals  which  the  spon- 
taneous forces  will  either  select  or  suppress.  But  a  con- 
scious ideal  is  more  than  a  cognitive  suggestion  that  has 
been  spontaneously  selected.  A  conscious  ideal  is  a  prod- 
uct of  thought  and  deliberate  choice.  And  thought  is 
reflective  rather  than  merely  cognitive  because  it  has  as 
its  norm  some  standard  of  perfection.  There  can  be  no 
reflective  thinking  without  the  presence  of  an  intellectual 
ideal,  a  norm  of  theoretic  perfection,  just  as  there  can  be 
no  deliberate  purpose  apart  from  some  norm  of  practical 
perfection.  Now,  social  reflection  is  thought  and  purpose 
coalescing  on  some  reflected  situation  which  will,  therefore, 
represent  an  ideal,  and  as  such  will  inspire  the  forces  of  its 
realization.  When  the  social  consciousness  has  once 
reached  the  stage  of  reflective  activity  it  will  be  universally 
true  that  it  will  have  no  other  fruitful  ideals  than  those 
that  are  supplied  in  the  ideals  of  reflection.  To  eliminate 
these  would  be  to  bring  social  progress  to  a  standstill  at  the 
point  where  it  is  passing  out  of  the  stage  of  mere  habit  into 
that  of  fruitful  accommodation.  Sociality  would  then 
mean  a  dead  level  of  monotonous  spontaneity. 


chap.  vin.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  323 

This  is  equivalent  to  saying,  however,  that  sociology 
will  cease  at  a  certain  point  to  be  a  natural  science  and  will 
become  a  science  of  final  causes.  And  there  seems  to  be  no 
help  for  this.  The  mere  presence  of  thoughts  and  pur- 
poses among  the  conditions  of  special  phenomena  is  not  in- 
consistent, as  we  have  seen,  with  the  application  of  natural 
science  methods.  But  when  these  thoughts  and  purposes 
take  the  form  of  social  ideals,  as  they  inevitably  will,  and 
in  so  far  as  they  act  the  part  of  ideals,  they  become  forces 
not  of  efficiencjr  but  rather  of  finality.  Their  operation  is 
teleological  rather  than  mechanical  and  cannot  be  esti- 
mated in  terms  of  natural  causation.  Natural  science  thus 
proves  the  fragmentary  character  of  its  method  as  a  way  of 
dealing  with  social  phenomena.  In  order  to  render  its  own 
field  intelligible  it  must  recognize  the  function  of  social 
ideals,  whereas  these  can  be  fruitfully  dealt  with  only  by 
a  method  that  transcends  its  own.  And  the  method  which 
thus  becomes  supplementary  to  that  of  natural  science  is 
no  other  than  the  method  of  metaphysics  in  a  special  form 
of  its  application.  For  metaphysics,  in  view  of  its  method 
at  least,  may  be  called  teleological  science,  and  consequently 
wherever  science  is  obliged  to  become  teleological  it  is 
obliged  to  become  metaphysical.  Such  a  conclusion  may  be 
maddening  to  those  who  entertain  a  phobia  for  metaphysics 
of  any  kind,  but  I  fail  to  see  how  it  can  be  avoided. 

The  further  metaphysical  implications  of  the  social 
consciousness  will  arise  mainly  in  two  different  quarters. 
In  the  first  place,  if  we  follow  the  clue  supplied  by  the 
social  ideal  we  shall  be  led  to  recognize  the  fundamental 
place  which  the  individual  holds  in  the  social  economy.  If 
we  consider  the  whole  business  of  social  ideals  we  shall  find 
that  in  no  case  is  the  initiative  in  social  progress  ever  taken 
by  society  or  the  social  group  as  a  whole.  The  initiative  is 
invariably  the  function  of  an  individual  or  a  small  group  of 
individuals  to  whom  the  new  suggestion  has  concurrently 
occurred.  Not  only  must  the  suggestion  come  to  the  individ- 
ual, but  the  individual  must  also  conceive  it  in  its  social 


324  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

form.  It  must  be  a  variation,  in  other  words,  which  is  fit  for 
social  use  and  which  society  may  select  if  it  sees  proper  to  do 
so.  The  originator  and  proposer  of  the  innovation  will, 
therefore,  be  a  social  individual,  and  his  innovation  will  take 
the  form  not  only  of  a  proposed  novelty  but  of  one  that  is  in 
the  line  of  progress.  It  will  embody  a  social  ideal.  All 
this  is  an  individual  function  and  it  gives  the  individual 
the  primacy  in  the  social  community.  Moreover,  our  analy- 
sis has  shown  how  essential  the  social  individual  is  to  the 
social  community.  The  units  of  society  must  be  social 
units,  and  it  is  only  by  virtue  of  the  social  character  of 
the  units  that  in  their  interaction  they  found  society  and 
not  a  mere  aggregation.  We  have  seen  that  there  are 
certain  forms  of  social  action  which  are  immediate  functions 
of  the  community  as  a  whole  and  not  of  the  individuals. 
But  even  here  further  reflection  will  lead  to  the  conclusion 
that,  in  the  last  analysis,  the  sources  of  these  communal 
forms  are  individual.  For  when  we  think  of  it,  we  cannot 
doubt  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  community-con- 
sciousness except  as  it  is  borne  by  individual  members  of 
the  community.  That  being  the  case,  the  common  social 
interests  that  prompt  community-action  will  exist  only  in 
the  consciousness  of  the  individual  members  of  the  com- 
munity. And  the  common  movements  that  arise  in  response 
will  be  resolvable  into  concurrent  movements  of  individuals. 
What  makes  the  commonalty,  in  the  last  analysis,  is  the 
fact  that  the  interest  or  movement  is  a  possession  or  func- 
tion of  every  member  of  the  community.  If,  now,  social 
communities  are,  in  the  last  analysis,  resolvable  into 
individual  agents,  and  if  it  be  the  prerogative  of  the  in- 
dividual not  only  to  supply  the  common  motives  of  social 
action,  but  also  those  ideals  without  which  social  progress 
is  impossible,  the  primacy  of  the  individual  becomes 
apparent. 

The  primacy  of  the  individual  in  social  organization 
and  progress  will  supply  an  important  datum  to  the  ques- 
tion as  to  which  is  to  be  regarded  as  the  more  real,  the 


CHAP.  7m.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  325 

individual  or  the  social  organism.  There  is  an  important 
sense,  of  course,  in  which  the  two  terms  are  inseparable. 
Without  the  individuals  there  could  be  no  organism,  and 
without  the  organism  the  individuals  would  at  least  fail  of 
the  greater  part  of  their  development.  But  if  we  put  the 
question,  Which  is  the  more  real  in  the  order  of  existence? 
then  clearly  the  answer  would  be  in  favor  of  the  individual. 
Society  is  resolvable  into  a  plurality  of  existent  social  units 
and  besides  these  there  are  no  other  existents.  Society 
itself  is  a  function  of  the  community  of  these  individual 
existents.  Moreover,  we  have  found  that  society  has  no 
consciousness  apart  from  the  individual  consciousness  in 
which  social  motives  are  responded  to.  And  the  forms  of 
social  movement  are  resolvable  into  the  concurrent  move- 
ments of  the  social  units.  Furthermore,  it  has  been  found 
that  social  progress  is  an  individual  prerogative,  since  varia- 
tions are  never  proposed  by  society  as  a  whole,  but  by  some 
innovating  individual.  And  when  society  wishes  to  hand 
down  its  possessions  as  a  patrimony  to  later  societies,  it  can 
do  so  only  by  translating  that  patrimony  through  education 
into  individual  possessions.  In  the  light  of  this  let  us  put 
the  question,  Is  the  individual  for  society  or  is  society  for  the 
individual?  Here  again  we  find  it  true  that  the  situation 
does  not  present  a  real  disjunction.  The  individual  is  for 
society  since  the  public  welfare  will  present  the  highest 
practical  object  of  individual  endeavor  and  the  social  ideal 
will  supply  the  highest  common  goal  of  action.  In  the 
whole  sphere  of  public  activity  the  individual  must  regard 
himself  as  a  servant  and  must  subordinate  his  personal 
interest  to  that  of  the  public.  And  when  the  welfare  of 
the  public  demands  it,  he  is  required  to  give  up  his  most 
cherished  possessions  and  sacrifice  even  life  itself  in  its 
defense.  Moreover,  the  life  of  the  individual  is  transient 
and  the  social  organism  supplies  him  with  the  only  medium 
through  which  he  can  hope  to  prolong  his  memory  or  his 
influence  beyond  the  period  of  his  own  life.  On  the  other 
hand,  societ}^  is  just  as  clearly  for  the  individual.     When 


326  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

it  wishes  any  of  its  interests  conserved  its  appeal  must  be 
to  the  individual.  Its  whole  resources  must  be  turned  into 
the  means  of  his  education,  and  upon  the  results  of  this 
education  will  hang  the  questions  whether  the  social  organ- 
ism shall  be  maintained  or  suffered  to  degenerate,  and 
whether  any  progress  shall  be  made  in  advance  of  current 
ideals. 

When  both  sides  have  been  argued  to  a  conclusion  there 
remains  the  question,  however,  which  of  these  terms  shall 
be  regarded  ultimately  as  the  more  real  and  as,  there- 
fore, supplying  an  end  in  itself  for  the  other.  "When  the 
question  is  put  in  this  form  we  are  prepared  to  take  the 
ground  that  the  individual  supplies  the  only  ultimate  end 
of  social  activity.  If  the  individual  is  not  the  end,  then 
there  must  be  some  more  ultimate  end  to  which  he  is  a 
means.  Now  it  is  to  be  understood  in  the  debate  on  this 
question  that  we  are  not  considering  the  relation  of  one 
individual  to  other  individuals  or  to  the  community  of 
individuals  of  which  the  state,  for  example,  is  comprised. 
Bather,  the  point  of  distinction  here  is  between  the  individ- 
uals comprising  the  state  and  their  interests,  and  some 
abstract  interest  or  ideal  of  the  whole  apart  from  the  inter- 
ests and  ideals  of  its  individual  members.  I  know  that  I 
am  on  debatable  ground  here  and  that  the  position  de- 
veloped will  be  open  to  the  charge  of  individualism.  But 
I  contend  that  there  is  a  true  as  well  as  a  false  individual- 
ism, and  what  I  conceive  to  be  the  true  individualism  is  a 
doctrine  that  plants  itself  squarely  on  the  proposition  that 
the  state,  and  here  I  take  the  state  to  represent  society  as  a 
whole,  can  have  no  legitimate  interests  and  aims  which  are 
not  tributary  to  the  interests  and  welfare  of  its  individual 
citizens.  The  prime  test  of  all  measures  of  state  policy 
will  thus  be  found  in  their  bearing  on  the  welfare  of  the 
citizens  of  the  state.  If  the  measures,  however  desirable 
they  may  seem  in  themselves,  are  likely  to  debauch  the 
morals  of  the  people  or  to  promote  ideals  of  citizenship 
which  will  be  bad  for  the  individuals  of  a  community,  then 


chap.  vin.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  327 

they  should  be  set  aside  as  representing  bad  statesmanship. 
From  one  point  of  view,  the  whole  duty  of  the  state  con- 
sists in  the  education  of  its  citizens.  From  another  point 
of  view,  its  duty  is  their  defense.  From  still  another,  its 
duty  is  to  conserve  their  material  prosperity.  When  it  has 
done  these  things,  with  due  regard,  of  course,  to  inter- 
national relations,  it  has  performed  its  whole  legitimate 
duty.  Moreover,  whenever  statecraft  sets  up  any  other 
goal  than  this  for  state  action  it  is  following  a  false  ideal 
that  will  be  sure  to  lead  to  pernicious  results. 

The  social  organism  is  not  an  end  in  itself.  It  is,  in 
the  last  analysis,  a  function  of  individuals  in  social  inter- 
action and  it  exists  as  a  means  for  the  development  of  the 
individual's  life.  "When  society  has  supplied  the  wants  of 
its  individual  members,  when  it  has  educated  them  up  to 
the  limit  of  its  facilities,  when  it  has  provided  the  means  for 
the  development  of  their  intellectual  and  aesthetic  capaci- 
ties, as  well  as  the  instruments  of  their  moral  and  spiritual 
culture ;  when  it  has  done  all  these  things  and  many  others 
which  the  growing  social  consciousness  of  the  individual 
requires,  it  will  then  have  performed  its  whole  legitimate 
duty.  But  in  all  this  the  social  organism  is  plainly  instru- 
mental to  the  interests  and  welfare  of  the  individuals. 
Should  it  set  itself  up,  however,  as  something  in  itself, 
having  the  right  to  coerce  individuals  to  its  own  ends,  it 
would  thereby  become  a  monster  which  finds  its  satisfaction 
in  swallowing  its  own  children.  The  final  view  of  society 
which  w^e  thus  reach  is  that  of  a  plurality  of  social  individ- 
uals who,  following  their  social  nature,  or  instincts  if  we 
prefer  the  word,  organize  into  forms  of  communal  action 
and  develop  the  organs  necessary  to  carry  these  forward. 
The  primary  forces  in  the  constitution,  development  and 
conservation,  of  the  social  organism  are  individual.  The 
individual  supplies  the  ideals  of  social  progress,  and  the 
interest  and  welfare  of  the  individuals  supply  a  criterion 
of  the  legitimate  aims  of  the  social  order. 

AVe  conclude,  then,  that  society  is,  in  the  last  analysis, 


328  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

for  the  individual,  and  subsidiary  to  the  interests  and  aims 
of  his  life.  The  metaphysical  bearing  of  this  result  will  be 
obvious  if  we  carry  the  reasoning  a  step  farther  and  con- 
clude that,  if  society  be  subordinate  to  the  individual,  then 
it  is  possible  for  the  individual  to  develop  needs  and  ideals 
for  which  the  social  order  will  provide  no  adequate  satis- 
faction. The  individual  may  become  conscious  of  being 
the  bearer  of  interests  and  ideas  that  are  ultra-social ;  or  at 
least  ultra  to  the  social  order  as  it  realizes  itself  in  his 
present  temporal  experience.  He  may  become  the  bearer 
of  ethical  and  religious  interests  and  ideals  which  by  their 
very  nature  will  not  fit  completely  into  this  temporal  order 
or  allow  the  individual  to  be  satisfied  with  the  limits  which 
it  sets  to  his  life-perspective  and  his  aspirations.  In  short, 
it  is  possible  that  the  social  organism  is  only  an  instrument 
which  the  nature  of  man  develops  as  a  means  of  realizing 
his  ordinary  temporal  welfare,  while  there  may  be  other 
deeper  interests  and  potencies  in  his  nature  the  normal 
satisfaction  of  which  requires  a  broader  horizon  than  that  of 
the  temporal  social  life,  as  well  as  the  operation  of  motives 
that,  in  some  essential  respects  at  least,  will  be  ultra-sociai. 
Wc  do  not  enlarge  on  this  consideration  here.  But  it  will 
be  found  to  have  vital  importance  if,  in  the  further 
advance  which  we  are  about  to  make  into  the  territory  of 
ethics  and  religion,  it  should  be  found  that  man,  by  virtue 
of  his  moral  and  religious  consciousness,  does  become  the 
bearer  of  interests  and  ideals  which  may  properly  be  called 
ultra-social. 

But  the  metaphysical  implications  of  the  social  have  not 
yet  been  completely  exhausted.  The  metaphysical  interest 
is  satisfied  only  when  some  ground  of  final  unification  is 
reached.  Now,  we  have  seen  that  what  we  call  the  social 
consciousness  is,  in  the  last  analysis,  a  function  of  the  social 
individual.  The  common  consciousness  is  simply  an  in- 
strument or  means  of  common  action  which  the  members  of 
the  community  develop  out  of  their  interactions.  It  has 
no  potency  in  itself  and  is  capable  of  developing  no  real 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  329 

unifying  principle.  In  short,  the  common  consciousness 
has  reality  only  as  it  is  resolvable  into  the  concurrent  con- 
sciousnesses of  a  plurality  of  individuals.  It  is  nothing, 
then,  that  can  supply  a  real  objective  principle  of  unifica- 
tion. Moreover,  we  have  seen  how  the  reflective  conscious- 
ness, which  does  supply  norms  of  unification  in  its  thoughts 
and  ideals,  is  never  able  to  impose  these  on  world-move- 
ments as  a  whole.  It  is  only  on  fragments  of  movements, 
and  then  only  partially,  that  the  unity  of  the  ideal  can  be 
imposed.  The  special  purposes  and  ideals  of  human  reflec- 
tion are  swallowed  up  in  the  movements  as  wholes,  so  that 
the  world-movements  in  the  social  sphere  must  be  supposed 
to  go  on  without  guidance  from  the  reflective  agencies 
of  the  individuals  of  which  they  are  composed.  But  we 
have  seen  that  the  ideals  of  reflection  are  the  only  means 
of  social  progress.  They  constitute  the  variations  which, 
when  selected  by  the  consciousness  of  the  group,  become 
the  motives  and  guides  of  progressive  action.  When,  how- 
ever, we  come  to  the  world-movements,  we  find  that  this 
instrument  of  progress  is  of  no  avail.  The  world-move- 
ments transcend  and  defy  the  ideals  and  guidance  of  all 
human  agents.  Is  it  possible,  then,  that  in  the  last  analysis 
the  social  world  as  a  whole  has  been  left  without  guidance 
or  ideals?— that  in  the  highest  court,  the  supreme  tribunal 
before  which  all  issues  are  finally  tried,  accident  reigns 
supreme,  and  that  no  better  justification  for  any  general 
result  can  be  given  than  that  it  has  so  chanced  to  turn  out  ? 
We  reach  a  point  here  where  we  are  threatened  with  the 
destruction  of  all  social  values.  The  whole  social  order 
is  on  the  brink  of  chaos  and  about  to  topple  over.  Now,  it 
is  no  fanciful  sketch  that  we  are  drawing  here.  The  truth 
is,  our  social  study  brings  us  into  the  presence  of  the  real 
point  of  issue  between  those  who  feel  the  necessity  of  reach- 
ing some  metaphysical  principle  of  unity  and  those  who 
either  do  not  feel  such  necessity,  or  at  least  do  not  ad- 
mit its  validity.  Without  arguing  the  question  here  we 
wish  simply  to  state  the  case  in  favor  of  the  metaphysical 


330 


SYNTHESIS. 


PART  II. 


alternative.  We  seem  to  have  reached  one  of  those  critical 
points  where  it  becomes  ^necessary  to  decide  between  two 
radically  different  ways  of  looking  at  the  world.  The  one 
is  that  of  the  mind  which  is  seeking  everywhere  for  rational 
and  intelligible  design  and  will  not  rest  satisfied  with  any 
explanation  that  does  not  reduce  its  world  as  a  whole  to 
terms  of  rational  order.  The  other  way  of  looking  at  the 
world  is  one  that  regards  its  order,  so  far  as  order  may 
prevail,  as  a  phenomenon,  a  result,  that  has  no  reason  which 
is  traceable,  in  the  nature  of  things.  The  world-order  is 
just  there  like  any  other  fact,  and  if  it  breaks  down  at  some 
point,  or  in  fact  at  all  points  when  pushed  far  enough, 
why  that  is  simply  another  fact  to  be  accepted.  We  might 
call  one  view  of  the  world  the  rational,  the  other  the  simple 
factual.  Between  these  two  views  it  seems  to  me  one 
must  choose  at  the  outset  and  with  full  consciousness  of 
what  it  implies.  Now  it  is  clear  that  the  whole  meta- 
physical construction  of  the  world  proceeds  on  the  primary 
choice  of  the  rational  rather  than  the  simple  factual  alter- 
native. It  is  not  satisfied  with  any  doctrine  that  cannot 
be  shown  to  be  ultimately  rational,  and  it  is  in  accordance 
with  this  very  demand  for  ultimate  rationality  that  the 
social  situation  which  we  have  pointed  out  above  cannot 
be  accepted  as  final. 

We  come,  then,  to  what  we  may  term  the  final  social 
synthesis.  The  limit  of  natural  science  in  the  treatment  of 
social  phenomena  has  already  been  determined.  Sociology 
will  be  a  natural  science  up  to  the  point  where  the  principle 
of  natural  causation  loses  its  explanatory  value.  We  have 
seen  that  this  point  is  reached  in  connection  with  the 
development  and  function  of  social  ideals.  This  is  the 
work  of  the  reflective  consciousness  operating  under  the 
categories  of  thought  and  purpose.  The  principle  oi 
reflection  is  not  natural  causation  but  finality.  Keflective 
movements  are  teleological  in  their  form  and  principle.  A 
synthesis  of  natural  causation  and  finality  thus  takes  place 
at  the  very  heart  of  sociology,  lifting  it  in  some  respects 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  331 

out  of  the  category  of  natural  science.  Let  us  assume  this 
synthesis,  however,  and  set  it  to  the  credit  of  science;  we 
are  thus  brought  up  to  the  point  where  a  final  synthesis 
is  seen  to  be  necessary.  Its  need  arises,  as  we  have  seen, 
out  of  the  exigencies  of  the  social  world  as  a  whole.  Not- 
withstanding the  function  that  is  performed  by  the  thought 
and  purpose  of  individual  social  agents,  the  social  move- 
ments as  a  whole  transcend  their  guiding  power  and  in 
their  largeness  seem  to  be  without  purpose  or  design. 
Shall  the  social  world  as  a  whole  be  left  a  prey  to  accident 
and  blind  fate?  We  have  seen  how,  in  meeting  this  issue, 
a  man  may  choose  to  be  either  a  rationalist  or  a  pure 
factualist.  He  must,  however,  accept  the  logic  of  his  alter- 
native. If  he  chooses  to  be  a  pure  factualist  he  must  bear 
in  mind  that  this  involves  the  giving  up  of  all  rational 
explanation.  As  a  pure  factualist  he  must  be  a  pure 
phenomenalist  in  his  science  as  well  as  in  his  philosophy. 
Now,  pure  phenomenalism  in  science  means  an  empiri- 
cism which  confines  itself  rigidly  to  mere  descriptive  gen- 
eralization and  refuses  to  connect  it  with  causation  or 
any  other  principle  of  deeper  grounding.  Pure  phenomen- 
alism cuts  science  in  two  very  sharply  at  the  point  where 
Bosanquet  draws  the  distinction  in  his  logic  between 
description  and  explanatory  theory.  The  factualist  is 
logically  debarred  from  any  theory  of  the  world.  He 
must  eschew  theory  altogether,  for  that  is  explanation  and 
goes  beyond  the  fact.  And  he  must  cultivate,  on  the  intel- 
lectual side,  exclusively  the  faculty  of  observation,  while 
reflection  must  be  put  to  sleep.  If  the  factualist  be  not 
satisfied  with  this  he  is  no  true  factualist,  but  very  likely 
a  rationalist  in  disguise. 

At  all  events,  there  is  no  other  real  alternative  between 
seeking  some  form  of  rational  construction  and  refusing  to 
theorize  our  world  at  all.  If  we  are  not  ready  to  espouse 
the  radical  position  of  the  pure  factualist  with  its  unblink- 
ing logic,  we  shall  then  be  amenable  to  all  the  motives  of 
rational  explanation.     And  just  as  in  view  of  the  results  of 


332  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

science  in  the  fields  of  physics  and  biology,  we  found  it 
necessary,  in  order  to  reach  a  completely  rational  construc- 
tion, to  effect  a  synthesis  between  natural  causation  and 
teleology  in  which  the  whole  sphere  of  reality  is  finally 
grounded  in  a  unitary  thought  and  purpose  and  so  re- 
deemed from  accident  and  chaos,  so  here  a  final  view  of  the 
social  world  reveals  the  need  of  the  same  kind  of  synthesis. 
The  social  consciousness  supplies  no  principles  of  final 
unification.  The  social  world  as  a  whole  is  thus  left  to 
accident  and  blind  fate,  unless  we  rise  to  a  final  synthesis 
in  which  the  world-movements  as  a  whole  are  conceived  as 
organized  and  guided  under  an  all-comprehending  thought 
and  purpose.  This  thought  and  purpose  would  not  be 
identical  with  the  common  thoughts  and  purposes  of  the 
social  groups;  nor  yet  with  a  generalization  of  these,  for 
we  have  seen  that  these  are  of  no  avail  for  the  whole  and 
that  generalization  is  only  abstraction.  The  final  meta- 
physical implication  of  sociology  seems  to  point  to  an 
eternal  consciousness  in  which  the  world-movements  as  a 
whole  are  conceived  and  purposively  directed  to  a  unitary 
end. 


At  this  stage  in  our  investigation  we  may  well  pause  a 
while  and  take  stock  (to  use  a  commercial  phrase)  of  what 
we  have  already  accomplished.  The  aim  of  the  whole  dis- 
cussion has  been  to  vindicate  the  right  of  mechanical 
science  in  its  own  field  and  yet  to  prove  its  inadequacy  as 
an  interpretation  of  the  world.  The  forces  and  material 
things  of  our  experience  are  real,  but  they  are  not  the  whole 
of  reality.  The  great  crux  of  any  world-theory  arises  in 
connection  with  the  problem  of  the  relative  claims  of  mat- 
ter and  mind.  We  have  seen  how  the  establishment  of  the 
primacy  of  mind  was  the  object  of  the  great  Copernican 
revolution,  effected  in  the  world  of  thought  by  Immanuel 
Kant,  a  revolution  the  full  significance  of  which  is  only 
dawning  upon  the  world  very  slowly  even  now  after  the 
lapse   of   a   century.     The  situation  may  be   very  simply 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  333 

stated  as  follows:  If  the  world  is  to  mean  anything'  more 
than  a  bare  appearance,  it  can  mean  this  only  to  some  con- 
scions  intelligence  that  asks  the  question.  And  the  ques- 
tion will  be  prompted  by  the  demand  that  reality  shall  be 
more  than  what  appears.  If  what  appears  does  not  satisfy 
the  conscious  propounder  of  the  question,  it  is  because  the^e 
is  something  lying  back  in  the  nature  of  what  appears  that 
is  not  expressed  in  the  appearance.  And  the  conscious 
propounder  finds  nothing  in  mere  appearance  because  he 
does  not  find  himself  there  or  what  is  akin  to  himself. 
This  is  the  secret  of  the  whole  movement  of  science  and 
metaphysics  in  their  effort  to  interpret  the  world.  We 
learn  in  experience  and  in  our  scientific  activities  how  the 
world-appearance  must  suffer  itself  to  be  overhauled  and 
reduced  to  a  phenomenon  of  that  which  does  not  appear  but 
is  assumed  to  be  more  real  than  itself.  Thus  the  world  of 
physical  science  arises,  a  dual  world  of  grounds  and  phe- 
nomena, the  appearances  of  which  are  grounded  in  and 
through  the  principle  of  natural  causation  so  that,  under 
the  categories  of  cause,  substance  and  interaction,  the 
presented  world  becomes  the  manifestation  of  a  dynamic 
world  of  agency  which  takes  on  the  mechanical  form  and 
embodies  its  meaning  for  knowledge  in  the  judgments  of 
science.  Let  us  not  forget,  however,  that  we  do  not  per- 
ceive this  world  of  mechanical  categories.  No  man  ever 
saw  matter  or  energy.  We  affirm  it  in  a  judgment  that  has 
its  first  and  deepest  source  in  the  subjective  demand  that 
reality  shall  be  more  than  appearance ;  and  more  in  these 
very  definite  senses;  first,  that  it  shall  be  more  stable  and 
persistent ;  second,  that  it  shall  take  the  form  of  an  activity 
in  some  sense  analogous  to  the  subject's  own.  This  latter 
presumption  is  the  primal  spring  out  of  which  the  whole 
effort  of  science  to  reach  an  explanation  of  its  world  arises. 
The  effort  takes  on  the  mechanical  form,  as  we  have  seen,  by 
virtue  of  the  fact  that  it  takes  its  departure  from  the  outer 
standpoint  of  perception,  and  deals  in  the  descriptive 
formulae  of  observation.     From  this  point  of  view,  accord- 


334  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

ing  to  a  process  which  we  have  followed  out  in  detail,  the 
mechanical  construction  of  science  develops  and  the  nature 
of  reality  is  defined  so  far  as  it  can  be,  in  terms  of  natural 
causation.  But  the  same  motive  that  leads  to  the  mechan- 
ical interpretation  of  science  also  makes  it  impossible  to 
rest  satisfied  with  the  world  conceived  as  a  mechanism. 
Let  us  bear  in  mind  that  mechanism  is  itself  the  result  of 
an  effort  of  man's  conscious  intelligence  to  find  some  thing 
deeper  in  the  world  than  mere  appearance.  But  the  same 
intelligence  refuses  to  be  finally  satisfied  with  mechanism. 
The  conscious  activity  that  wells  up  in  man  is  self-initiative 
and  living;  it  is  previsive,  purposive  and  end-seeking.  It 
is  an  activity  in  which  the  end  realized  is  conceived  in  idea 
and  attained  through  the  mediation  of  purpose.  The 
further  step  of  world-interpretation  which  we  call  meta- 
physical, therefore,  is  motived,  as  was  the  mechanical,  by  a 
demand  that  the  world  at  its  heart  shall  be  found  akin  to 
the  beating  heart  of  the  intelligent  thing  that  seeks  to 
realize  it.  This  is  the  secret  of  the  process  we  have  been 
following  out  in  the  preceding  chapters,  a  process  in  which 
it  becomes  apparent  that  natural  science  in  all  its  fields, 
if  pursued  profoundly  enough,  will  lead  to  a  point  where 
it  will  be  made  clear  that,  in  order  to  reach  a  final  inter- 
pretation, we  must  make  the  passage  from  mechanism  to 
purpose. 

Finally,  the  same  motive  that  leads  to  the  synthesis  in 
which  mechanism  is  conserved  and  at  the  same  time  tran- 
scended by  its  passage  into  purpose,  also  requires  that  the 
synthesis  shall  be  generalized  into  a  principle  for  the  whole 
as  well  as  for  individuals  and  parts.  It  is  clear  enough  on 
reflection  that  a  principle  of  this  nature  must  apply  to  the 
whole  or  it  loses  all  its  value  for  details.  Hence,  when  the 
problem  arises,  as  it  must,  of  the  destiny  of  the  individual 
in  so  far  as  it  transcends  the  social  organism ;  or,  when  the 
problem  of  the  meaning  of  history  as  a  whole,  which  in  its 
range  transcends  the  widest  scope  of  individual  and 
finite  purposes,  becomes  pressing;  the  same  motive  that  led 


chap.  viii.  THE  SOCIAL  SYNTHESIS.  335 

to  the  subordination  of  mechanism  to  purpose,  will  lead 
here  to  the  final  reference  of  the  world-movement  as  a 
whole  to  the  synthetic  grasp  of  an  all-comprehending  pur- 
pose. Now,  an  all-comprehending  purpose  is  a  form  of 
agency  which  can  be  exercised  only  by  consciousness  that  is 
able  to  relate  itself  in  like  manner  to  every  part  of  the  real, 
and,  therefore,  to  reality  as  a  ivhole.  Some  eternal  con- 
sciousness that  shall  be  the  adequate  bearer  of  an  all- 
comprehending  purpose,  seems,  therefore,  to  be  the  last 
postulate  of  metaphysics. 


PART  II 

SYNTHESIS 


DIVISION  B 

FROM  SOCIALITY  TO   RELIGION 


CHAPTER  I. 


ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES. 


In  treating  of  the  ethical  activities  of  man,  the  first  ques- 
tion that  comes  up  in  this  connection  is  that  of  the  relation 
of  the  ethical  to  the  social.  In  a  very  important  respect 
man's  ethical  experience  will  appear  to  be  an  aspect  of  his 
broader  social  experiences.  Now,  we  have  seen  that  the 
whole  of  the  social  is  a  manifestation  of  consciousness.  We 
have  also  had  occasion  to  distinguish  between  the  spon- 
taneous and  reflective  social  activities,  and  have  found  that 
to  the  reflective  consciousness,  taking  the  form  of  thought 
and  purpose,  is  due  the  ideals  of  social  progress.  While  it 
is  true  in  general  that  the  law  of  habit  operates  universally 
in  the  field  of  social  products,  reducing  them  to  customary 
and  traditional  forms,  yet  in  the  sphere  of  social  functions, 
habit  shares  the  field  with  accommodation  and  in  reflection 
we  have  a  higher  form  of  accommodation.  It  is  only  the 
reflective  consciousness,  moreover,  that  is  sufficiently  free 
from  the  bondage  of  habit  and  tradition  to  perform  the 
function  of  real  initiative  by  conceiving  new  fields  for  the 
exercise  of  the  accommodating  activity. 

Now,  the  ethical  as  a  phase  of  sociality  is  not  only  a 
function  of  consciousness,  but,  more  especially,  of  the 
reflective  consciousness.  Man  can  act  socially  below  the 
level  of  reflection,  but  it  is  difficult  to  conceive  how  he  could 
act  ethically  until  he  had  formed  in  his  consciousness  the 
notion  of  some  ideal  or  standard  of  action.    The  very  notion 

339 


340  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

of  an  ethical  motive  is  that  of  a  force  which  comes  in  to 
inhibit  impulse;  or  at  least  to  lay  down  the  law  to  it  by 
placing  before  consciousness  a  consideration  that  involves 
the  subordination  of  impulse  to  a  superimposed  standard. 
This  character  the  ethical  will  share  with  other  motives  of  a 
reflective  character;  for  it  cannot  be  maintained  that  the 
ethical  exhausts  the  whole  sphere  of  reflective  activity. 
There  may  be  ethically  indifferent  motives  for  the  post- 
ponement of  impulse  or  spontaneous  desire,  such  as  pru- 
dence, thrift  or  ambition.  What  is  claimed  here  is  that 
the  ethical  belongs  to  the  genus  reflective  and  is  possible 
only  to  a  consciousness  that  has  begun  to  think.  Now  we 
have  seen  that  the  principle  function  of  reflection  in  the 
social  movement  is  that  of  conceiving  and  proposing  new 
social  arrangements  which  we  have  called  variations,  the 
question  whether  these  be  selected  or  rejected  depending 
ultimately  on  whether  they  can  be  fitted  into  the  general 
scheme  of  social  accommodation.  In  case  the  proposed 
innovation  succeeds  in  getting  itself  selected  it  takes  its 
place  as  an  ideal  aim  of  social  activity. 

If,  then,  we  represent  the  general  function  of  social 
reflection  as  that  of  supplying  ideals  of  social  action,  how 
shall  we  characterize  the  ethical  in  order  to  distinguish  it 
from  other  forms  of  social  ideals?  It  will  not  be  sufficient 
to  say  that  the  ethical  is  practical  and  directs  to  the  attain- 
ment of  some  good.  So  are  the  other  social  ideals  practical 
and  they  also  point  to  some  good.  Moreover,  we  cannot 
say  that  its  distinctive  feature  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  is  an 
ideal,  that  is,  the  notion  of  what  is  to  become  but  as  yet  is 
not.  All  ideals  possess  this  character  in  common,  and  it 
simply  indicates  that  there  is  as  yet  something  desirable 
that  is  conceivable  but  not  as  yet  actual.  The  differentia 
of  the  ethical  must  lie  either  in  the  special  content  of  the 
ideal  or  in  the  way  it  relates  itself  to  the  consciousness  of 
the  individual  or  the  community.  Now  it  is  possible  that 
there  may  be  differences  of  both  content  and  mode  and  this 
will  come  up   for  later  consideration.     But  here  we  are 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  341 

prepared  only  to  take  account  of  the  latter.  There  is  a 
difference  between  the  mode  of  the  ethical  and  that  of  the 
non-ethical  which  may  be  expressed  as  follows.  The  non- 
et hical  may  impose  itself  by  virtue  of  a  physical  necessity 
so  that  we  may  feel  constrained  to  yield  to  it  against  our 
will;  or  it  may  impose  itself  with  a  logical  necessity  so 
that  we  see  that  it  goes  whether  we  will  it  or  not  But  the 
truly  ethical  differs  from  both  of  these  by  virtue  of  the  fact 
that  it  imposes  its  authority  on  the  will  through  the  assent 
of  the  will  itself.  By  the  will  I  mean  here  that  whole  prac- 
tical agency  by  which  a  conscious  being  realizes  the  ends 
of  its  life.  Kant  called  it  practical  reason,  a  term  that 
has  the  merit  of  emphasizing  the  fact  that  ethics  is  a  dis- 
tinctive product  of  the  reflective  consciousness. 

Now  it  is  clear  that  in  the  species  of  authoritativeness, 
by  virtue  of  which  the  will  itself  feels  the  ideal  of  conduct 
presented  to  be  necessary  and  binding,  we  have  the  formal 
differentia  of  the  ethical.  And  it  is  in  view  of  this  special 
characteristic  of  the  ethical  that  wre  propose  to  consider  as 
our  second  problem,  how  far  the  ethical  can  be  regarded  as 
a  phase  or  product  of  sociality.  That  ethics  arises  out 
of  social  soil  and  that  it  is  in  large  part  social,  are  not 
here  in  dispute.  We  are  interested  in  the  question  whether 
the  claim  of  sociality  may  be  made  exclusive  or  whether 
ethics  may  not  possess  ultra-social  aspects.  There  is  only 
one  way  of  determining  such  a  question  and  that  is  by  sub- 
mitting the  basal  concepts  of  ethics  to  analysis.  This  we 
now  proceed  to  do.  The  question  as  to  what  constitute  the 
most  fundamental  notions  in  ethics  is  one  that  is  not  very 
difficult  to  answer.  Aside  from  the  notion  of  ought, 
obligation  or  duty,  which  is  central,  there  are  the 
other  ground-concepts  of  right  and  good  and  their  oppo- 
sites.  There  are,  then,  at  least  three  fundamental  ethical 
concepts,  obligation,  right  and  good.  If  we  take  the 
notion  of  obligation  or  duty,  as  it  is  found  in  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  adult,  it  will  not  be  difficult  to  analyze  it  into 
two  elements;   (1)  the  presence  of  some  ideal  to  the  mind 


342  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

which  carries  the  form  and  pressure  of  something  that  is 
proposed  to  be  realized,  (2)  an  assent  of  will  by  virtue  of 
which  it  becomes  obligatory.  There  never  is  the  pure  pres- 
sure of  obligation  from  without.  It  is  essential  to  obliga- 
tion, and  to  the  sense  of  obligation,  that  the  assent  of  will 
should  make  the  pressure  internal  rather  than  external, 
since  through  assent  the  will  becomes  self-legislating  and 
its  own  law  becomes  binding  upon  itself.  There  is,  how- 
ever, another  aspect  of  moral  obligation  which  Kant  first 
brought  out  clearly.  Kant  distinguished  between  condi- 
tional and  unconditional  obligation.  A  conditional  obliga- 
tion is  one  that  depends  on  a  prior  choice  of  will  which, 
however,  may  be  dissolved.  The  dependent  obligation 
then  ceases.  For  example,  if  my  son  wishes  to  become  a 
civil  engineer,  he  will  be  obliged  to  study  a  certain  quan- 
tity and  kind  of  mathematics.  Let  him  change  his  plans, 
however,  and  decide  on  some  other  vocation  that  does  not 
involve  the  mathematics  in  question.  The  obligation 
immediately  ceases  to  exist.  Now,  the  obligation  called 
moral,  is  one  that  is  free  from  such  contingencies  and 
exerts  its  pressure  not  simply  as  an  imperative  which  the 
will  endorses,  but  as  a  categorical  imperative  which  the  will 
asserts  as  unconditional  and  unhypothetical. 

The  way  in  which  this  characteristic  of  moral  obliga- 
tion works  out  in  practice  may  be  stated  as  follows.  The 
notion  or  idea  of  duty  is  a  universal  one,  but  it  is  not, 
therefore,  an  abstraction.  It  is  an  omnipresent  term  in 
consciousness  which  has  the  peculiar  power  of  turning 
every  situation  in  life  into  one  in  which  there  is  a  par- 
ticular, specific  duty  to  be  performed.  And  the  peculiarity 
of  moral  experience  is  that  the  omnipresent  notion  of  duty 
does  not  become  active  except  in  special  situations  where 
some  particular  duty  is  to  be  performed.  Our  general 
moral  experience  takes  the  form  of  a  recognition  of  the 
fact  that  there  will  generally  be  a  duty  to  be  performed. 
But  we  do  not  feel  the  pressure  of  the  imperative  except  in 
concrete  instances  of  duty,  and  when  the  concrete  situa- 


chap.  I.  ETIITCAL  ACTIVITIES.  343 

tion  arises  where  the  specific  duty  is  to  be  performed  we 
feel  the  pressure  of  the  imperative  even  when  wholly 
unable  to  determine  what  particular  acts  ought  to  be  per- 
formed. The  pressure  is  on  us  to  do,  even  when  the  par- 
ticular actions  we  are  to  perform  are  as  yet  wholly  un- 
determined. We  are  simply  reporting  actual  moral  ex- 
perience here,  and  we  may  go  a  step  further.  Not  only 
does  the  pressure  operate  where  the  categories  of  conduct 
are  empty,  but  also  where  a  number  of  conflicting  alter- 
natives present  themselves.  The  most  painful  dilemma 
of  the  moral  consciousness  arises  where  there  is  an  apparent 
conflict  of  duties.  Further,  when  conscience  seems  to  be 
divided  against  itself,  the  real  stress  of  the  situation  does 
not  arise  from  the  pressure  of  these  alternatives  but  rather 
from  the  necessity  we  feel  ourselves  under  of  coming  to  some 
conclusion.  This  feeling  of  necessity  is  the  real  force  of 
the  categorical  imperative  which  tells  us  that  however 
complicated  the  situation  may  be,  there  is  some  one  thing 
that  ought  to  be  done. 

With  this  report  from  the  court  of  ordinary  experience- 
let  us  return  to  the  question,  how  far  the  ethical  can  be 
regarded  as  a  social  product.  We  have  seen  that  the 
ethical  is  generically  a  form  of  social  ideal  but  that  it 
represents  a  peculiar  species  of  that  ideal.  The  ethical  ideal 
is  one  regarding  which  there  is  no  prior  option  the  reso- 
lution of  which  can  render  it  in  any  sense  conditional. 
Does  this  not  cut  the  function  of  selection  up  by  the 
roots  and  render  the  relation  of  the  ethical  ideal  to  the 
consciousness  of  the  individual  or  community  wholly 
unique  .'  We  are  not  ready  as  yet  to  answer  this  question 
in  the  affirmative,  for  it  will  be  remembered  that  our 
analysis  of  obligation  has  separated  it  into  two  parts,  the 
presentation  of  some  ideal  of  action  and  the  subjective 
assent  of  will  which  is  necessary  to  turn  it  into  obligation. 
Now,  the  question  arises  here  whether  these  two  elements 
of  obligation  may  not  be  identified  with  the  two  social 
functions  with  which  we  are  already  familiar.     May  it  not 


344  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

be  possible  that  the  objective  element  in  obligation  is 
identical  with  that  function  of  initiative  which  is  exercised 
by  the  thinking  activity  of  the  social  consciousness,  by 
virtue  of  which,  new  situations  are  conceived?  And  may 
it  not  be  also  that  the  assent  of  will  of  which  we  have 
spoken  is  the  method  by  which  the  objective  variation  is 
selected  and  made  part  of  the  content  of  a  scheme  of  duty  ? 
It  seems  clear  at  least  that  the  ethical  moments  in  obliga- 
tion arise  out  of  these  more  general  social  functions.  The 
situation  will  be  a  socially  conceived  situation  and  will 
embody  some  proposal  for  action  that  will  stand  for  a 
variation;  something  not  only  new  but  also  in  advance  of 
what  is,  and  standing  thus  before  us  as  an  ideal.  Now, 
below  the  stage  of  reflection,  in  the  field  of  the  spontaneous 
processes,  the  variation  will  still  arise,  mediated  by  the  un- 
reflecting cognitive  activity,  and  the  selective  act  will  be 
performed  by  the  individual  or  communal  consciousness. 
There,  however,  it  will  be  a  spontaneous  reaction  in  view  of 
the  agreeableness  or  disagreeableness  of  the  ' '  copy ' '  or  pres- 
entation. The  lowest  forms  of  sociality  will  fall  into 
this  spontaneous  mold.  But  as  sociality  becomes  more 
complex  and  reflection  at  last  emerges,  there  will  be  a 
development  of  both  terms  of  the  transaction.  The  objec- 
tive term  will  take  on  the  form  of  a  definitely  conceived 
ideal  and  the  subjective  selection  will  take  the  form  of  a 
more  complex  reaction  of  satisfaction  or  dissatisfaction. 

Now,  as  A.  E.  Tylor  points  out,1  satisfaction  and  dissat- 
isfaction are  not  to  be  identified  with  mere  agreeableness  or 
disagreeableness.  It  is  a  more  complex  experience  involv- 
ing elements  of  reflection,  and  contains,  in  germ  at  least, 
a  judgment  of  approval  or  disapproval.  Mr.  Taylor  re- 
gards this  reaction  of  satisfaction  and  dissatisfaction  as 
the  one  ground-category  out  of  which  all  other  ethical  con- 
ceptions may  be  developed,  a  position  to  which  we  do  not 
commit    ourselves    here.     It    is    clear,    however,    that    the 

xThe  Problem  of  Conduct,  Chap.  VI.  Pleasure,  Duty  and  the 
Good. 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  345 

selective  act  by  which  a  proposed  social  variation  is  appro- 
priated or  rejected  would,  as  consciousness  develops  its 
1  effective  functions,  come  to  be  a  judgment  of  approval  or 
disapproval.  And  we  should  have  a  proposed  ideal  varia- 
tion on  the  one  hand,  met  with  a  judgment  of  approval  or 
disapproval  on  the  other.  The  question  then  arises ;  If  we 
translate  the  social  transaction  into  a  judgment  of  approval 
or  disapproval  pronounced  in  view  of  a  proposed  ideal  of 
conduct,  have  we  not  thereby  created  an  ethical  situation? 
It  is  very  easy  to  make  a  mistake  here  in  the  way  of  over- 
looking real  distinctions.  If  we  recall  the  fact  that  the 
ethical  judgment,  or  assent  of  will,  as  we  designated  it 
before,  is  one  that  not  only  endorses  an  objective  situation, 
but  through  its  assent  makes  it  unconditionally  binding, 
it  will  become  apparent  that  the  assent  or  dissent  we  call 
ethical  possesses  a  quality  which  differentiates  it  from  gen- 
eral judgments  of  approval  or  disapproval.  A  general 
social  judgment  of  approval  or  disapproval  would  be  one 
that  would  involve  simply  the  congruity  of  the  proposed 
variation  with  the  habitual  life  of  the  individual  or  the 
community.  But  there  is  nothing  distinctively  ethical  in 
the  notion  of  congruity.  A  proposed  variation  might  be  con- 
gruous for  a  variety  of  non-ethical  reasons,  and  the 
judgment  of  approval  might  be  one  that  had  nothing  dis- 
tinctively ethical  in  it. 

In  the  social  judgment  of  approval  or  disapproval  we 
have  presented  simply  the  genus  but  not  the  differentia  of 
the  ethical.  We  have  yet  to  discover  the  characteristic 
quality  which  translates  a  general  judgment  of  social  ap- 
proval or  disapproval  into  a  distinctively  ethical  judgment. 
We  have,  however,  made  some  progress.  We  have  dis- 
covered the  genus  to  which  the  ethical  belongs.  We  may 
class  it  broadly  as  a  judgment  of  approval  or  disapproval 
on  the  part  of  the  social  individual  or  community.  Let  us 
then  follow  our  analysis  farther.  In  the  first  place,  there 
is  no  evidence  that  the  sense  of  obligation  in  its  general 
form  is  anything  but  a  late  development  of  the  moral  con- 


346  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

sciousness.  On  the  contrary,  what  we  may  expect,  in  the 
first  instance,  to  find  is  the  more  or  less  segregated  develop- 
ment of  special  forms  of  obligation  within  very  circum- 
scribed social  limits.  This  will  be  true  at  least  in  the  lower 
stages  of  development.  Morality  only  tends  to  universalize 
itself,  when,  under  the  influence  of  the  great  moral  religions 
and  other  moral  forces,  the  social  ideas  of  man  begin  to  tran- 
scend ethical  limits  and  tend  to  become  universal.  In  fact, 
it  may  be  said  with  some  truth  that  a  fully  developed 
conscience  must  wait  on  a  universalized  social  conscious- 
ness. Bearing  in  mind  that  our  special  problem  here  is 
that  of  the  unconditionalness  of  moral  obligation,  involving 
of  course  its  innerness,  there  are  two  methods  by  which  we 
may  seek  to  account  for  this.  The  first  and  more  formal 
is  that  followed  by  thinkers  of  the  school  of  Herbert 
Spencer  who  find  in  the  development  of  the  various  forms 
cf  objective  control  to  which  man  is  subjected  in  society, 
the  norms  out  of  which  the  ethical  control  develops.  Thus 
there  are  at  least  three  distinct  types  of  outer  compulsion 
to  which  the  members  of  the  social  group  will  be  subject: 
the  religious,  the  political  and  public  opinion.  Taking 
the  religious  form  of  control  as  an  instance,  this  will 
be  effected  in  the  lower  stages  mainly  by  the  taboo  or  the 
setting  apart  of  certain  objects  as  sacred  or  accursed  and 
not  to  be  touched;  in  the  higher  stages,  by  associating  the 
control  directly  with  the  will  of  the  Deity.  The  political 
control  is  obviously  one  of  the  most  obtrusive  and  effective 
inasmuch  as  its  sanctions  operate  more  swiftly  and  more 
universally.  But  the  most  general  form  of  control  is 
doubtless  that  of  public  opinion,  which  is  the  organ  through 
which  the  judgment  of  the  group-consciousness  is  brought 
to  bear  on  the  conduct  of  its  individual  members. 

The  main  contention  of  this  school;  namely,  that  these 
objective  controls  tend  to  become  inner  and  subjective  and 
serve  as  principles  of  judgment  in  accordance  with  which 
men  express  approval  or  disapproval;  this  contention,  I 
say,  may  be  accepted  as  resting  on  solid  grounds  of  evi- 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  347 

deuce.  Observation  of  men  in  society  shows  that  this 
process  has  been  generally  operative,  the  result  being  that 
the  whole  mode  of  reaction  of  the  members  of  any  social 
organism,  provided  it  be  sufficiently  large  and  permanent, 
Like  a  nation,  will  take  on  the  complexion  of  the  social 
conditions  and  forms  of  control  under  which  they  have 
grown  up.  We  shall  be  justified,  then,  in  admitting  the 
correctness  of  the  opinion  that  this  tendency  to  pass  from 
the  objective  and  outer  to  the  inner  and  subjective  goes 
a  great  way  toward  explaining  the  rise  and  character  of 
our  social  judgments  of  approval  and  disapproval.  But 
it  does  not  fully  explain  the  categorical  imperativeness  of 
the  ethical  judgments.  Men  very  soon  learn  by  reflection 
to  distinguish  between  what  they  call  the  relative  and  the 
intrinsic  or  absolute,  and  while  they  may  not  always  be  able 
to  render  a  clear  account  to  the  metaphysician  as  to  what 
these  terms  mean,  they  nevertheless  cover  a  real  distinction. 
There  are  some  things  that  can  be  shaken  and  these  vary 
with  circumstances.  But  an  ethical  judgment  at  least 
ignores  this  and  is  uttered  with  the  consciousness  that 
what  it  binds  on  earth  shall  be  bound  in  heaven  and  that 
what  it  looses  on  earth  shall  be  loosed  in  heaven.  We  are 
not  concerned  here  with  the  question  whether  this  con- 
sciousness may  not  be  mistaken.  We  are  interested  in  its 
existence  as  a  fact  and  in  the  question  whether  it  is  com- 
pletely explainable  by  the  principle  of  the  Spencerian 
school.  And  we  think  a  negative  answer  follows  in  view 
of  the  fact  that  reflection  is  not  as  a  rule  deceived  by  its 
judgments,  and  that  were  ethical  judgments  merely  rela- 
tive in  fact,  they  would  cease  to  be  unconditional.  It  is 
impossible  for  reflection  to  perpetrate  upon  itself  a  pious 
fraud  of  such  magnitude. 

This  leads  us,  then,  to  consider  the  less  formal  and  more 
intrinsic  method  of  accounting  for  the  unconditionalness  of 
the  ethical  judgment.  We  have  already  pointed  to  the  fact 
that  moral  evolution  has  doubtless  followed  special  lines 
and  that  the  development  of  a  perfectly  general  sense  of 


348  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

obligation  is  no  doubt  a  late  product.  The  method  we  are 
about  to  exemplify  is  one  in  which  an  effort  is  made, 
by  analyzing  the  simpler  forms  of  experience,  to  show 
how  the  sense  of  justice,  for  example,  would  be  developed 
out  of  conditions  where  it  did  not  already  exist.  The 
aim  is  thus  to  trace  the  genesis  of  all  the  specific  contents 
which  enter  into  the  general  sense  of  obligation.  The 
analysis  here  entered  upon  rests  on  the  supposition  of  the 
existence  of  a  plurality  of  social  units  in  a  state  of  inter- 
action. No  higher  degree  of  social  organization  is  pre- 
supposed, and  the  social  intelligence  is  supposed  to  be  at 
that  stage  where  collision  would  be  a  frequent,  if  not  the 
ordinary,  mode  of  interaction  among  the  units.  We  are 
supposing  that  in  the  minds  of  these  rude  units  the  sense 
of  justice  has  not  as  yet  arisen,  and  the  question  is,  how 
are  we  to  suppose  them  to  come,  through  their  experience, 
into  the  possession  of  a  rudimentary  sense  of  justice  ?  Let 
us  suppose  that  a  group  composed  of  a,  b,  c,  x,  y,  z,  have 
been  hunting,  and  that  when  it  comes  to  the  distribution  of 
the  kill,  x,  y,  z  combine  to  seize  all  or  the  larger  share  of 
the  meat,  leaving  a,  b,  c  practically  without  any  of  the 
desirable  commodity.  Inevitably  there  will  spring  up  in 
the  minds  of  a,  b,  c  the  feeling  that  they  have  been  hardly 
used,  and  without  much  reflection,  perhaps,  they  will 
adopt  measures  of  reprisal.  Now,  however  crude  the 
experience  of  a,  b,  c  may  be,  there  will  without  doubt  be 
present  in  it  the  feeling  that  they  have  not  been  fairly 
treated.  This  will  be  a  motive,  though  very  likely  not  the 
dominating  one,  in  their  efforts  toward  reprisal.  Should 
they  proceed  to  assert  their  claims  against  x,  y,  z  it  is  diffi- 
cult to  see  how  this  group  could  in  the  end  escape  the  feel- 
ing that  they  had  aggressed  on  a,  b,  c,  and  that  in  fairness 
part  of  the  kill  in  their  possession  belongs  to  a,  b,  c.  We 
are  not  supposing  any  erudite  reflection  but  simply  a  judg- 
ment of  which  a  consciousness  a  little  above  the  dog's  would 
be  capable.  The  reflection  we  speak  of  might  be  tempora- 
rily drowned  out  by  the  passions  of  the  conflict  that  would 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  349 

arise,  and  the  whole  outer  phenomenon  would  doubtless  be 
that  of  a  struggle  of  might  with  might  in  which  the  prey 
would  go  to  the  stronger.  But  these  struggling  forces  are 
conscious  units  and,  however  low  down  in  the  social  scale, 
have  a  certain  power  of  entering  into  the  point  of  view  and 
feelings  of  their  social  others.  And  this  rudimentary  social 
imagination  would  be  the  theater  of  an  inner  drama  less 
spectacular  than  the  outer,  but  not  less  potent  in  shaping 
the  destinies  of  the  parties  concerned.  The  working  out  of 
this  inner  drama  may  be  described  as  follows.  The  sense 
of  being  defrauded,  which  leads  a,  b,  c  to  seek  restitution, 
would  lead  the  minds  of  x,  y,  z  to  a  responsive  feeling  of 
having  aggressed  on  the  legitimate  expectations  of  a,  b,  c. 
This  sense  would  put  x,  y,  z  in  the  wrong,  and  whether  they 
yielded  to  it  or  not  in  action,  there  would  be  something  in 
their  consciousness  that  wTould  persist  in  assenting  to  the 
claims  of  a,  b,  c.  No  doubt  this  assent  would  at  first  be 
angrily  crushed  back  as  something  traitorous  and  the  issue 
would  be  fought  out  on  the  field  of  battle.  But  it  has  at 
least  shown  itself  in  the  world  and  has  marked  an  epoch 
in  human  experience. 

Let  us  consider  now  what  is  involved  in  this  experience 
and  what  it  is  that  x,  y,  z  now  know  which  they  did  not 
know  before.  Briefly,  we  may  say  that  they  have  arrived 
at  the  germ  at  least  of  the  sense  of  justice  in  their  feeling 
that  they  have  aggressed  on  a,  b,  c  and  owe  reparation. 
But  what  is  the  sense  of  justice  in  its  essence?  We  must 
bear  in  mind  that,  however  undeveloped,  the  group  we  are 
dealing  with  is  a  social  group  and  the  members  are  social 
units.  They  will  have  in  connection  with  their  joint  enter- 
prises like  this  kill,  a  dim  consciousness  of  community 
which  will  be  the  tacit  basis  of  their  co-operation.  Now 
just  in  so  far  as  this  sense  of  community  dominates  them 
they  will  have  the  sense  of  a  common  social  interest.  But 
what  is  a  common  social  interest?  It  is  one  in  which  the 
individual  members  share  equally.  This  feeling  of  com- 
mon interest  so  far  as  it  operates  at  all  will  give  rise  to  the 


350  SYNTHESIS.  parth. 

feeling  in  the  consciousness  of  each  unit  that  he  is  not 
working  exclusively  to  his  own  hand,  but  that  he  is  working 
for  the  community,  and  this  feeling  will  lead  him  to  decide 
against  himself  when  through  his  instrumentality  part  of 
the  community  has  failed  to  profit  by  the  joint  labor  of 
himself  and  others. 

The  rise  of  the  sense  of  justice,  or  rather,  the  sense  of 
injustice,  will  thus  be  mediated  by  the  sense  of  a  com- 
munity of  interests  in  which  the  individual  members 
are  conscious  of  sharing  equally.  I  use  this  term  equally 
here  in  a  qualitative  rather  than  a  quantitative  sense.  I 
do  not  forget  that  the  lion's  share  of  the  kill  would  be 
more  than  that  of  the  wolf  or  the  jackal.  But  in  truth  it  is 
in  a  community  of  relatively  equal  social  units,  that  is, 
among  foxes  or  lions  or  men,  that  the  sense  of  justice  would 
have  any  chance  of  rising.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  only 
among  men  would  the  conditions  of  its  rise  clearly  exist. 
Its  presupposition  is  a  community  of  units  of  the  same 
kind,  and  we  must  suppose  this  sense  of  kind  and  the  com- 
munity of  interests  to  which  it  gives  rise  as  supplying  the 
social  soil  out  of  which  alone  the  sense  of  justice  could  be 
generated.  Now,  in  view  of  community  interests  in  which 
the  social  units  who  make  up  the  community  are  conscious 
of  sharing  in  common,  my  sense  of  justice  will  be  my 
feeling  that  the  share  of  every  other  unit  in  the  common 
interest  is  like  my  own,  and  I  shall  feel  obliged  to  abstain 
from  injustice.  My  experience  would  be  likely  to  take  this 
negative  form  because  the  notion  of  injustice  is  the  one 
that  immediately  violates  my  sense  of  community  of  inter- 
est. Let  us  bear  in  mind  that  the  sense  of  justice  is  the  feel- 
ing of  the  equal  share  of  all  in  an  object  of  common  interest 
and  that  the  sense  of  injustice  is,  therefore,  a  direct  contra- 
diction of  the  sense  of  community  of  interests.  In  another 
place  we  have  submitted  the  community  consciousness  to 
analysis  and  have  found  that  there  is  no  such  consciousness 
apart  from  the  social  consciousnesses  of  the  individual  mem- 
bers of  the  community.     The  community  arises  out  of  a 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  351 

basis  of  common  interests,  that  is,  interests  in  which  all  the 
individual  interests  coincide,  and  its  consciousness  is  simply 
what  all  the  social  units  think  it  to  be  in  so  far  as  these 
thoughts  are  alike.  In  the  last  analysis,  then,  the  individual 
consciousness  is  the  bearer  of  the  ideal  of  community,  and 
each  social  individual 's  ideal  of  community  will  be  identical 
with  the  ideal  of  his  objective  self,  so  far  as  he  is  conscious 
of  having  interests  and  living  a  life  that  he  shares  in  com- 
mon with  all  the  social  units  of  the  community.  The  voice 
of  justice  ivill  therefore  he  that  of  this  equating  social  self 
requiring  that  all  units  shall  share  equally  in  this  common 
life  and  interest. 

We  can  say,  then,  that  we  feel  the  obligation  to  be  just 
because  justice  is  an  immediate  implication  of  our  social 
sense  of  community.  Let  us  turn  now  to  another  law  of 
conduct  that  is  indisputably  obligating  in  the  ethical  sense, 
the  law  of  truthfulness.  Every  man  feels  unconditionally 
obliged  to  be  truthful,  notwithstanding  the  perplexing 
question  as  to  whether  a  lie  be  ever  justifiable.  For  the  gist 
of  the  whole  question  here  is  not  whether  a  real  lie  is  ever 
justifiable,  but  rather  whether  what  appears  to  be  a  lie  may 
not  turn  out  in  some  instances  not  to  be  a  lie  at  all.  A  lie 
arises  out  of  the  relation  between  our  thoughts  on  the  one 
hand  and  our  words  and  actions  on  the  other.  Normally 
our  words  and  actions  stand  as  symbols  of  our  thoughts, 
and  when  they  really  symbolize  they  do  not  deceive.  A  lie 
is  the  use  of  a  false  (that  is,  a  misrepresenting)  symbol 
with  the  intention  to  deceive,  and  when  it  attains  its  pur- 
pose someone  has  been  deceived  into  thinking  something 
true  that  is  not  true,  or  real  that  is  not  real.  It  is  not  the 
intellectual  form  of  the  lie,  but  its  ethical  content  with 
which  we  are  concerned  here.  Now,  the  ethical  significance 
of  the  lie  consists  in  the  fact  that  the  legitimate  expecta- 
tions of  someone  have  been  intentionally  disappointed,  so 
that  where  he  was  led  to  anticipate  one  kind  of  result 
nothing  at  all,  or  something  different,  has  come  to  pass.  A 
lie  is  much  wider  in  its  scope  than  the  promise,  but  the  case 


352  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

of  a  promise  or  definite  pledge  will  no  doubt  supply  its 
clearest  instance.  Let  us  go  back,  then,  to  our  primitive 
groups,  a,  b,  c  and  x,  y,  z,  and  let  us  suppose  that  they 
divide  into  two  companies,  agreeing  to  share  equally  of  the 
products  of  their  efforts.  But  a,  b,  c  agree  among  them- 
selves to  keep  back  a  certain  percentage  of  their  kill  for  their 
own  use,  putting  the  remainder  into  the  common  stock. 
Let  us  suppose  that  x,  y,  z  discover  the  trick  that  has  been 
played  on  them.  They  will  not  only  have  the  sense  of 
injustice  in  being  defrauded  of  their  share  of  the  kill,  but 
they  will  have  an  added  grievance.  The  group  a,  b,  c  have 
intentionally  deceived  them  by  attempting  to  make  them 
believe  that  a  part  of  their  meat  is  the  whole.  This  meat 
all  belonged  to  the  common  stock;  here  lay  the  injus- 
tice. But  a,  b,  c  attempted  to  pass  a  portion  of  it  off  for 
the  whole;  here  was  the  lie.  In  what,  then,  did  the  lie 
consist?  In  making  a  false  representation?  This  might 
be  done  without  intention  to  deceive.  It  would  not  then  be 
a  lie.  Moreover,  objectively,  the  injustice  may  take  place 
without  the  lie.  It  would  be  possible  for  a,  b,  c  to  hold 
back  part  of  the  kill  in  various  ways  without  deceiving. 
In  such  case,  while  x,  y,  z  have  been  unjustly  treated,  they 
have  not  been  deceived.  The  essence  of  the  lie  in  this 
case  seems  to  consist  in  two  things;  subjectively,  in  the 
purpose  of  a,  b,  c  to  employ  symbols  falsely  so  as  to  make 
a  false  representation;  objectively,  the  fact  that  legiti- 
mate expectations  on  the  part  of  x,  y,  z  are  disappointed. 
I  say  legitimate  expectations  because  x,  y,  z  might  expect 
something  that  would  be  unreasonable  and  which  a,  b,  c 
would  not  be  guilty  of  lying  in  not  fulfilling. 

In  setting  up  the  standard  of  legitimate  expectation, 
however,  we  have  appealed  directly  to  a  social  criterion. 
The  standard  of  legitimate  expectation  will  be  the  habitual 
interpretation  the  community  puts  on  such  transactions,— 
the  customary  implication  of  such  pledges  as  a,  b,  c  have 
given  x,  y,  z.  This  will  form  the  standard  of  legitimate  ex- 
pectations for  a,  b,  c,  x,  y,  z;  and  the  deliberate  purpose  of 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  353 

a,  b,  c  to  contravene  this  standard  and  thus  deceive  x,  y,  z,  is 
what  constitutes  the  essence  of  their  lie.  If,  then,  their  lie 
should  be  brought  home  to  them  by  the  forcible  efforts  of 
x,  y,  z  to  right  the  wrong  or  by  any  other  means,  they  would 
find  themselves  on  reflection  assenting  to  the  accusation  of 
those  they  had  deceived.  Their  assent  would  be  an  en- 
dorsement of  truthfulness  as  obligatory,  though  here  it 
would  take  the  negative  form  of  an  unconditional  con- 
demnation of  tying.  How,  then,  is  lying  related  to  the 
social  consciousness?  In  this  way,— the  social  conscious- 
ness is  a  consciousness  of  common  agreements.  This  is  its 
essence  and  constitutes  the  fundamental  bond  of  sociality 
without  which  society  could  not  exist.  Now,  these  common 
agreements  include  not  only  common  interests  but  common 
modes  of  prosecuting  them,  and  these  will  involve  modes 
of  speech  as  well  as  modes  of  action.  There  will  thus  arise 
certain  customary  connections  between  forms  of  speech 
and  forms  of  practical  activity  on  the  one  hand,  and  the 
conservation  of  the  interests  of  the  community  on  the  other, 
and  these  customary  connections  will  form  the  grounds  of 
legitimate  expectation  in  this  community.  The  lie  is  a 
direct  breach  of  this  form  of  publicity,  and  being  so,  re- 
ceives the  immediate  anathema  of  the  social  consciousness. 
We  may  say,  then,  that  lying  is  unconditionally  condemned 
in  this  case  because  it  directly  contravenes  one  fundamental 
condition  of  the  social  consciousness  itself. 

The  instances  of  justice  and  truthfulness  will  be  suffi- 
cient, I  think,  to  illustrate  this  method  of  tracing  the 
genesis  of  ethical  obligation.  Now,  as  between  the  two 
methods,  the  greater  importance  must,  it  seems  to  me,  be 
assigned  to  the  second.  We  are  willing  to  admit  that  there 
is  a  tendency  for  objective  controls  to  become  subjective 
and  to  become  principles  of  judgments  of  approval  or  dis- 
approval. But  what  we  fail  to  see  is  how  this  supplies  a 
special  ground  for  the  ethical  judgment.  Our  judgments 
of  approval  and  disapproval  are  pronounced  from  various 
points  of  view,  and  we  are  conscious  that  they  have  various 
23 


354  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

degrees  of  authority.  Why  should  some  of  our  judgments 
have  a  kind  of  authority  that  is  unique ;  why  should  they 
be  unconditional,  excluding  contingency  and  possible  excep- 
tions? It  would  seem  that  the  only  answer  to  such  a 
question  is  to  be  found  by  an  analysis  of  experience  with 
a  view  to  determining  the  soil  out  of  which  the  judgments 
have  arisen.  We  have  seen  that  justice  and  truthfulness 
are  immediate  deductions  from  sociality  itself.  These  may, 
I  think,  be  taken  as  representative  instances,  and  we  may 
draw  the  general  conclusion  that  the  first  ground  of  ethical 
obligation  is  to  be  found  in  the  constitution  of  the  social 
consciousness.  The  concepts  of  right  and  good  are  con- 
cepts of  the  content  of  ethical  obligation.  The  whole 
content  of  obligation  is  the  sum  of  the  kinds  of  conduct 
that  are  affirmed  in  unconditional  judgments.  Thus  in 
its  details  obligation  enjoins  justice,  truthfulness,  honesty 
and  the  rest.  But  as  a  whole  and  in  its  unity,  it  enjoins 
an  ideal  of  action  which  taken  as  a  whole  embodies  the 
conduct  of  an  ideal  self.  This  ideal  of  conduct  is  what 
would  be  actual  were  we  ourselves  what  we  ought  to  be. 
Now  the  right  and  good  are  categories  of  this  conduct  of 
the  ideal  self  both  in  its  details  and  as  a  whole,  although 
the  category  of  good  is  more  ordinarily  applied  to  the  ideal 
content  as  a  whole.  We  may  ask,  then,  what  are  the  right 
and  good  in  their  ethical  significance,  and  how  do  they 
characterize  the  ethical  content?  We  saw  in  our  consid- 
eration of  the  content  of  the  ethical  ideal  that  it  resolves 
itself  into  kinds  of  conduct  that  are  obligatory,  as,  for 
example,  we  must  be  just,  truthful  and  honest.  The  laws 
of  obligation  are  therefore  laws  of  conduct  and  as  such 
injunctions  on  the  will.  The  right  is  simply  the  principle 
that  is  exemplified  in  all  these  laws  of  conduct.  If  we 
codify  all  the  details  of  obligation  under  one  concept,  we 
shall  have  the  concept  of  the  right.  Thus  when  we  say, 
"Shall  not  the  judge  of  all  the  earth  do  right?"  we  mean 
to  ask  if  his  conduct  shall  not  ideally  fulfill  all  the  laws  of 
obligation.     This  being  the  case,  righteousness  will  be  an 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  355 

attitude  of  will,  the  subjective  equivalent  of  the  right  in 
conduct,  The  righteous  will  is  one  that  realizes  the 
right  in  conduct.  The  ethically  wrong  is  the  opposite  of 
the  ethically  right.  In  its  details  it  is  injustice,  falsehood, 
dishonesty,  specific  infractions  of  the  laws  of  right,  while 
in  its  unity  it  stands  over  against  the  right  in  conduct  as 
that  which  opposes  and  nullifies  its  laws.  Righteousness 
stands,  then,  as  the  subjective  disposition  of  will  that 
corresponds  to  the  right  in  the  sphere  of  conduct. 

How,  then,  are  right  and  righteousness  related  to  the 
social  consciousness?  We  have  seen  that  the  various  laws 
of  obligation  owe  their  unconditionalness  to  the  fact  that 
they  are  immediate  deductions  from  the  constitution  of 
sociality  itself.  The  right,  being  the  ideal  unification  of 
these  laws,  would  stand  as  the  obligatory  social  ideal  itself 
in  its  unity,  and  righteousness  would  be  the  attitude  of 
will  that  would  lead  to  this  ethical  wholeness  of  the  social 
in  the  sphere  of  conduct.  Turning  now  to  the  category  of 
the  good,  we  find  many  analogies  between  it  and  the  right, 
although  it  is  a  category  of  feeling  rather  than  of  will. 
There  are  also  important  differences  between  the  right  and 
the  good.  The  contents  of  the  right  are  the  laws  of 
obligating  conduct.  These  are  right  by  virtue  of  their 
very  nature  as  obligatory  laws  of  conduct.  But  the  con- 
tent of  the  good  is  not  laws  of  conduct  but  states  of  feeling. 
These  may  be  summed  up  under  the  one  term,  happiness. 
The  content  of  goodness  will  then  be  happiness  while  un- 
happiness  or  misery  will  be  the  bad  in  its  content.  But  we 
meet  with  a  peculiar  difficulty  here.  Happiness  and  misery 
in  themselves  are  wholly  non-ethical.  How,  then,  do  they 
become  the  content  of  ethical  good?  Let  us  change  our 
terminology  here,  substituting  desirable  for  happiness,  and 
the  situation  will  become  clearer.  The  desirable  is  iden- 
tical with  the  good.  But  there  are  many  things  that  are 
desired  that  are  either  non-moral  or  positively  immoral. 
It  is  clear  that  we  must  have  some  criterion  of  the  ethically 
good  that  will  enable  us  to  define  the  morally  desirable. 


356  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

It  is  here,  again,  that  we  are  obliged  to  look  into  the  social 
consciousness  for  our  criterion.  The  socially  good  man  is 
the  man  to  whom  the  desirable  is  the  health  or  well-being 
of  the  social  organism  of  which  he  forms  a  part.  We  use 
the  terms  health  and  well-being  here  in  the  broadest  possi- 
ble sense.  Now,  the  morally  good  man  is  one  who  has  the 
same  object  of  desire  but  with  a  difference.  The  mere 
socially  good  man  might  be  led  to  approve  the  immoral, 
provided  it  seemed  to  contribute  to  general  welfare.  But 
the  morally  good  man  will  find  his  criterion  in  the  prin- 
ciple of  rightness.  He  will  not  go  so  far,  perhaps,  as  to 
say  that  the  good  shall  always  be  identical  with  the  right, 
but  he  will  apply  his  criterion  negatively  and  say  that 
nothing  that  is  wrong  or  immoral  can  be  good.  The  ethical 
good  will  thus  be  the  whole  body  of  the  desirable  so  far  as  it 
is  not  inconsistent  with  the  law  of  righteousness.  We  thus 
find  that  the  ethical  category  of  the  good  is  the  social  cate- 
gory qualified  by  the  application  of  the  law  of  righteous- 
ness as  a  principle  of  exclusion.  The  doctrine  as  thus 
developed  is  materially  different  from  that  of  Kant,  who 
excludes  feeling  and  desire  from  the  moral  category  of 
good  and  fills  it  up  with  stoical  satisfaction  arising  from 
the  consciousness  of  virtue.  We  admit  natural  happiness 
as  content  of  good,  and  only  insist  on  the  exclusion  of  those 
elements  that  are  inconsistent  with  the  reign  of  moral  law. 
The  moral  good  man  is  thus  the  social  good  man  plus  a 
discrimination  that  excludes  all  immoral  elements  from  the 
category  of  goodness. 

Genetic  psychology  develops  an  account  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  individual  socius  that  corresponds  with  the 
one  here  given,  although  expressed  in  different  terminology. 
The  center  of  the  genetic  representation  is  the  developing 
self,  and  it  is  shown  how  the  process  by  which  self-realiza- 
tion is  reached  is  also  the  process  in  which  the  consciousness 
of  the  other  arises,  so  that  the  social  consciousness  becomes 
a  function  of  a  developing  self.  Now,  there  are  two  sides 
to  this  unfolding  process;    (1)    its  relation  to  the  social 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  357 

others,  (2)  its  relation  to  the  social  consciousness  of  the 
self.  We  put  the  objective  first  because  there  is  a  sense  in 
which  the  realization  of  the  object  precedes  the  process  of 
self-realization.  If  we  suppose,  then,  that  a  two-sided 
movement  is  in  progress,  we  shall  have  on  the  objective  side  a 
developing  apprehension  of  the  group  of  social  others  that 
constitutes  the  community.  Our  concept  of  this  commun- 
ity will  be  constantly  enlarging,  and  the  result  will  be  that 
we  shall  find  ourselves  entering  more  and  more  into  the  life 
of  the  community.  On  the  side  of  the  self  the  process  is 
that  of  the  growing  social  nature  of  the  self.  We  have 
seen  that,  in  the  last  analysis,  the  self  is  the  real  bearer  of 
the  social  consciousness ;  that  the  last  and  permanent  results 
of  the  social  process  are,  therefore,  the  development  of  the 
social  nature  of  the  self.  It  is  from  this  subjective  side 
and  from  this  point  of  view,— that  of  the  socially  developed 
self,— that  the  genetic  psychologist,  or  as  we  might  have  said, 
the  genetic  sociologist,  approaches  the  ethical  problem ;  and 
he  finds  from  this  point  of  view  that  the  sense  of  obligation 
arises  out  of  a  kind  of  dialectic  between  the  individual  and 
the  social  self.  Thus  the  individual  self,  setting  itself  over 
against  various  forms  or  stages  of  the  social  self,  finds  that 
their  claims  upon  it  take  the  form  of  obligation.  And  in 
all  cases  the  claim  is  translated  into  the  obligatory,  through 
the  assent  of  what  we  may  call  the  private  self.  Thus,  we 
find  that  the  claims  of  the  family  become  part  of  the  duty 
of  the  private  self,  not  only  claiming  precedence  of  its 
private  interests,  but  having  their  claim  allowed  in  its 
consciousness.  Moreover,  the  claims  of  society  and  of  the 
state  exercise  the  same  sort  of  pressure  and  have  their 
claims  assented  to  in  the  consciousness  of  the  individual. 
In  Foundations  of  Knowledge  I  have  generalized  this 
situation  under  the  principle  that  the  larger  and  richer 
self  claims  the  right  to  legislate  for  the  narrower  and 
poorer  self  and  has  its  claims  allowed  in  the  assent  of  this 
poorer  self.  The  reason  for  this  was  not  further  pointed 
out  in  that  treatise,  but  it  seems  to  me  that  we  are  in  a 


358  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

position  here  to  follow  out  the  analysis  a  step  or  two 
farther.  It  is  perhaps  a  too  mechanical  mode  of  represen- 
tation to  say  that  the  larger  self  claims  the  right  to  legislate 
for  the  narrower  or  smaller  self.  If,  however,  we  translate 
the  notion  of  the  larger  self  into  qualitative  terms  we  shall 
find  that  it  means  the  self  that  is  the  bearer  of  the  com- 
munal consciousness,  and  that  this  self,  in  and  through 
this  consciousness,  develops  the  representation  of  a  life  in 
which  it  and  the  other  social  existents  like  itself  participate 
in  common.  The  self  thus  becomes  the  bearer  of  a  common 
life,  or,  in  view  of  the  social  ideal,  of  a  common  life-ideal, 
in  which  it  has  an  undivided  interest  and  which  offers  to 
it  the  largest  possible  sphere  of  realization.  The  pressure 
of  the  larger  self  thus  becomes  identical  with  the  pressure 
of  the  larger  social  ideal  on  the  consciousness  of  the  individ- 
ual self.  Now,  we  might  still  ask  why  the  pressure  of  this 
ideal  should  take  the  form  of  imperative  demand  and  why 
the  private  self  so  meekly  assents  to  it.  '  This, '  we  may  say, 
'is  pusillanimous  and  the  private  self  ought  to  show  more 
of  the  spirit  of  resistance?  However,  we  get  a  clue  to  the 
solution  of  the  knot  when  we  remember  that  it  is  just  this 
social  consciousness  out  of  which  our  ideas  of  justice, 
truthfulness,  and  honesty  have  arisen,  and  that  just  as 
these  are  involved  in  the  maintenance  of  the  integrity  of 
the  social  ideal  along  special  lines,  so  likewise  the  social 
ideal  as  a  whole  exerts  a  corresponding  pressure  upon  the 
consciousness  of  the  private  individual  and  has  its  cargo  of 
claims  allowed.  This  social  pressure  exerts  itself,  in  the 
last  analysis,  by  virtue  of  its  commonalty,  for  it  will  always 
be  assented  to  without  debate  when  the  terms  of  the  situa- 
tion have  been  made  clear;  and  what  is  a  common  concern 
to  other  existents  and  myself  alike  will  rightfully  take  pre- 
cedence of  what  is  exclusively  a  concern  of  my  own.  And 
in  general  the  only  reason  the  private  individual  needs  in 
order  to  convince  him  that  any  given  claim  has  the  rightful 
pressure  of  duty  is  to  be  shown  that  the  claim  presses  on 
all  individuals  alike  in  like  circumstances. 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  359 

Up  to  this  point  we  have  been  dealing  with  the  social 
roots  of  ethics.  But  the  question  will  arise  whether  ethics 
be  a  purely  social  phenomenon  or  whether  it  may  not  have 
roots,  or  at  least  implications,  that  are  uUra-soei&l.  This 
is  a  vital  question  inasmuch  as  the  ethical  includes  so  many 
of  the  vital  interests  of  humanity.  Now,  Kant  among  the 
modern  moralists,  and  the  Kantian  school,  postulating  an 
ultra-social  root  of  ethics,  seek  it  in  their  doctrine  of  the 
transcendent  self.  Regarding  the  self  in  consciousness  as 
purely  phenomenal  and  not,  therefore,  an  adequate  bearer 
of  moral  issues,  the  Kantians  relate  ethics  directly  to  a  real 
self  that  transcends  experience  and  cannot  be  theoretically 
determined,  but  which  from  the  practical  point  of  view, 
Kant  defines  as  will.  This  transcendent  self  conceived  as 
will  becomes  the  bearer  of  a  kind  of  intelligence  which 
Kant  calls  practical  reason  and  which  determines  man  as, 
first,  the  real  subject  of  duty  and  then  as  free,  immortal 
and  an  heir  of  God.  The  whole  of  the  Kantian  contention 
depends,  however,  on  the  validity  of  his  distinction  between 
a  phenomenal  self  in  experience  and  a  real  self  that  stands 
outside  of  experience  and  is  incognizable.  Without  argu- 
ing the  case  here  it  will  be  clear  that  for  those  who  agree 
with  the  doctrine  developed  in  this  treatise  and  also  in  the 
Foundations  of  Knowledge,  Kant's  distinction  is  not 
tenable.  The  only  self  which  we  can  know  to  be  immediately 
real  is  the  self  that  functions  in  experience.  We  have  seen 
that  consciousness  itself  must  be  taken  as  real,  else  the 
whole  world  becomes  illusory.  If  consciousness  be  real, 
then  the  self  that  functions  centrally  in  it  and  to  the  type 
of  which  all  its  activities  tend  to  conform,  will  be  the  great 
reality  and  it  will  not  be  necessary  to  go  outside  of  the 
house  in  order  to  find  its  real  owner.  In  short,  it  is  with 
the  real  self  and  not  a  mere  phenomenon  that  we  have  had 
to  do  from  the  beginning.  This  appears  in  our  doctrine  of 
existents  where  we  trace  the  things  of  knowledge  to  extra- 
mental  but  not  to  extra-experiential  roots.  It  also  appears 
in  the  whole  social  doctrine  thus  far  developed.     The  social 


360  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

selves  and  others,  with  which  we  deal,  are  real  existents, 
and  their  individual  and  social  consciousness  is  one  in 
which  the  real  self  finds  expression. 

It  is  clear,  then,  that  if  we  are  to  seel;  for  ultra-social 
roots  of  the  ethical  consciousness  we  must  look  in  a  different 
direction.  But  if  the  Kantian  expedient  fails  us,  there  is 
but  one  other  transcendent  spring  to  which  we  could  look, 
and  that  is  supplied  by  religion.  If  it  be  necessary  to 
look  for  a  transcendent  ground  of  ethics,  it  will  be  to 
seek  in  the  consciousness  of  some  self  analogous  to  our 
own.  Moreover,  this  ground  must  also  be  transcendent 
not  in  any  mechanical  sense  as  lying  outside  or  above  or  be- 
low the  plane  of  my  individual  self,  but  as  supplying  some- 
thing which  my  own  selfhood  lacks,  and  which  is  at  the  same 
time  necessary  to  the  founding  or  the  completing  of  ethical 
theory.  If,  then,  any  such  transcendent  root  or  spring  be 
needed,  we  shall  have  to  seek  it  in  the  notion  of  some  divine 
selfhood  analogous  to  the  God  of  religion.  But  we  need 
to  determine,  in  the  first  place,  whether  and  in  what  sense 
our  ethics  requires  this  transcendent  supplementation.  As 
to  these  questions  it  seems  to  me  to  be  clear  that  ethics  does 
not  rest  immediately,  at  any  point,  on  that  which  is  tran- 
scendent. Our  analysis  has  shown  I  think,  that  our  ethics 
arises  directly  out  of  our  social  experience.  The  immediate 
data  of  obligation,  right  and  good,  are  social,  and  we  have 
shown  in  detail  how  such  principles  as  justice  and  truth- 
fulness arise  immediately  out  of  social  experience.  There 
seems  to  be  no  legitimate  ground,  then,  for  the  claim  some- 
times set  up,  that  there  is  no  distinct  basis  for  ethics 
outside  of  religion.  We  think  that  both  ethics  and  religion 
would  be  injured  by  such  a  false  claim  as  this.  If,  how- 
ever, ethics  rests  on  a  distinct  and  extra-religious  basis 
in  experience,  how  can  it  be  shown  to  be  necessary  that 
ethics  should  at  some  point  appeal  to  the  transcendent 
ground  of  religion? 

We  are  not  considering  the  historical  question  here, 
for  no  one  denies  the  influence  which  religion  has  undoubt- 


chap.  I.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  3(31 

cdly  exercised  iu  the  development  of  both  theoretic  and 
practical  morals  and  it  is  not  our  business  here  to  attempt 
to  measure  the  amount  of  that  influence.  What  we  are  con- 
cerned with  is  the  question  whether  at  some  point  ethics 
Avill  find  the  appeal  to  religion,  or  at  least  to  religious 
grounds,  necessary  in  order  to  complete  itself  or  validate 
its  own  conceptions.  Now,  if  we  revert  to  the  chapters  on 
sociology  wre  may  recall  that  it  was  there  found  necessary 
to  relate  the  social  movements  as  a  whole  to  some  tran- 
scendent principle.  And  the  data  which  rendered  this 
necessary  were  revealed  in  the  fact  that  the  social  move- 
ments as  a  whole  were  found  to  completely  transcend  that 
synthesis  of  thought  and  purpose  by  which  fragmentary 
social  movements  are  ideally  informed  and  guided.  We 
had  our  choice,  then,  between  an  alternative  that  left  the 
social  world  as  a  whole  to  accident  and  blind  fate,  or  one 
that  related  the  social,  in  common  with  other  phases  of 
world-movement,  to  some  transcendent  principle  of  pre- 
vision by  which  it  is  unified  and  guided  to  a  rational  goal. 
The  latter  alternative  being  chosen,  it  was  found  that  the 
social  world  could  be  completely  rationalized  and  its  move- 
ment as  a  whole  redeemed  from  chaos  only  by  informing 
it  with  a  thought  and  design  that  could  be  the  function  of 
an  eternal  consciousness  alone,  that  is,  of  a  consciousness 
that  is  able  to  comprehend  and  ideally  determine  the  whole 
and  not  simply  the  parts.  Now,  the  ethical  situation  pre- 
sents something  analogous  to  the  social,  and  an  appeal  to 
the  transcendent  will  be  in  order ;  (1)  in  view  of  the  ultimate 
relativity  of  all  the  concepts  of  social  ethics;  (2)  as  a  point 
of  view  from  which  alone  some  of  the  ultimate  problems 
of  ethics  can  be  solved.  It  will  be  evident,  we  think,  from 
the  discussion  itself,  that  all  the  concepts  of  social  ethics 
are  left  in  a  condition  of  relativity.  We  may  say  in  gen- 
eral that  these  concepts  arise  as  functions  of  the  developing 
sense  of  community.  This  being  the  case,  they  can  never 
rise  above  their  source.  Every  community  in  so  far  as  it 
has  developed  its  community-consciousness,  will  belong  to 


362  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  past,  and  every  step  it  makes  in  advance  will  involve 
the  transcendence  of  its  own  communal  consciousness.  But 
it  is  this  communal  consciousness  of  which  the  ethical 
judgments  are  functions;  consequently  the  social  standard 
is  constantly  being  left  behind.  Or,  if  we  adopt  what  is 
perhaps  a  more  adequate  conception  and  say  that  the  com- 
munal consciousness  we  mean  is  a  progressive  one  including 
accommodation  as  well  as  habit,  it  still  remains  true  that 
our  standard  is  constantly  changing.  Add  to  this  the  fact 
that  different  communities  are  not  only  variable,  but  that 
they  do  in  fact  vary  indefinitely  and  the  further  fact  that  a 
common  social  standard  that  shall  voice  the  whole  is  not 
available,  we  are  forced  to  the  conclusion  that  the  founda- 
tions of  morality  are  not  much  firmer  than  shifting  sand. 
and  there  is  danger  that  all  our  ethical  judgments  may 
become  mere  opportune  pronouncements  of  expediency. 
In  order  that  this  relativity  may  be  cured  and  our  ethical 
concepts  founded  on  a  solid  basis,  it  would  seem  that  we 
need  nothing  short  of  an  appeal  to  some  consciousness  in 
which  the  social  movement  as  a  whole  stands  ideally 
realized,  or  at  least  a  consciousness  in  which  its  movement 
as  a  whole  is  not  determined  by  accident  or  blind  fate. 
Only  from  the  point  of  view  of  such  a  consciousness  can 
we  conceive  our  relative  concepts  as  completing  themselves 
and,  as  concepts  of  the  whole,  acquiring  unconditional 
validity  for  the  parts. 

Moreover,  there  are  a  number  of  ultimate  problems  in 
ethics  that  do  not  admit  of  solution  from  the  ordinary  point 
of  view  of  sociology  or  social  psychology.  Take,  for 
example,  the  problem  of  freedom.  It  is  found  that  the 
most  psychology  can  do  in  this  matter  is  to  show,  which 
it  does  very  conclusively,  that  conscious  choice  is  self- 
determining  in  its  form,  and  that  it  therefore  mani- 
fests the  form  of  freedom.  But  the  individual  is  related 
to  antecedents  that  lie  outside  of  his  present  consciousness, 
by  means  of  development  and  heredity  as  well  as  through 
the  influence  of  his  environment.     It  is  not  enough  to  say 


chap.  i.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  363 

that  all  these  influences,  whatever  they  may  be,  must  enter 
into  the  present  choice  as  conscious  motive  and  thus  con- 
form to  the  form  of  freedom.  All  this  is  conceded.  It  is 
not  the  form  but  the  substance  of  freedom  that  is  giving  us 
the  trouble.  The  influences  we  speak  of  may  so  prede- 
termine us  that  anyone  knowing  them  could  safely  predict 
our  choice  on  the  principle  of  natural  causation.  Then 
again,  our  normal  choices  are  social  rather  than  individual 
functions.  I  mean  by  this  that  they  are  functions,  in  gen- 
eral, of  the  self  as  a  socius,  as  the  bearer  of  a  social  con- 
sciousness, rather  than  functions  of  the  private  individual 
self.  This  is  true  universally,  I  think,  in  the  case  of  ethical 
decisions  and  these  are  the  only  decisions  in  connection  with 
which  the  issue  of  freedom  is  important.  In  short,  it  is  to 
the  self  of  the  social  relations,  and,  therefore,  to  the  social 
self  that  the  question  of  duty  becomes  real  and  the  issue  of 
freedom  important. 

Let  us  then  attempt  to  restate  the  problem  of  freedom 
from  this  point  of  view.  Analytical  psychology  tells  us 
that  the  form  of  conscious  choice  is  that  of  freedom  (it  is 
teleological).  But  biology  and  genetic  psychology  unite 
in  telling  us  that  our  present  choice  is  a  member  of  a 
developing  series,  the  parts  of  which  are,  through  environ- 
ment and  heredity,  predetermined  by  their  antecedents. 
Biology  and  genetic  psychology  say  to  us  virtually  that 
the  data  they  are  able  to  discover  are  practically  sufficient 
to  so  enmesh  this  free-in-form  choice  of  ours  in  the  net  of 
antecedent  conditions  as  to  make  it  possible  to  account  for 
it  on  the  principle  of  natural  causation.  But  social  ethics 
tells  us  that  there  are  choices,  and  these  not  few  nor  unim- 
portant, which  we  are  in  duty  bound  to  make,  irrespective 
of  the  testimony  of  biology  or  genetic  psychology,  and  our 
consciousness,  untroubled  by  the  problem  of  predetermina- 
tion, says  "yea  and  amen."  The  question  of  freedom  is 
simply  this;  whether  or  not  we  are  able  to  obey  the  socius 
that  is  in  us  and  do  what  presents  itself  as  the  content  of 
our  duty.     The  vital  issue  in  the  problem  of  freedom  is  not, 


364  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

then,  whether  the  form  of  our  choice  be  self-determination 
or  not.  It  is  conceded  that  this  is  the  form,  and  that  moral 
choice  is  formally  free.  But  is  it  free  in  fact?  Here  the 
whole  question  resolves  itself  into  this,  whether,  granting 
that  we  have  the  power  to  choose  ethically  and  do  our  duty, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  there  is  anything  in  our  action  that  was 
not  predetermined  by  natural  causation.  Of  course,  if  it 
be  true  that,  given  the  fact  that  the  form  of  the  choice  is 
teleological  and  the  agencies  of  heredity  and  environment, 
the  nature  of  the  choice  could  be  predicted,  then  it  would 
seem  that  the  old  Kantian  dilemma  were  back  on  us  again 
and  that  while  we  cannot  deny  the  possibility  of  freedom, 
yet  as  a  matter  of  fact  everything  seems  to  be  determined  by 
natural  causation.  Let  us  be  clear  on  the  point  that  the 
issue  of  freedom  does  not  turn  on  the  question  whether 
we  can  or  cannot  do  our  duty.  But  assuming  that  we  can 
do  our  duty,  has  the  content  of  it  been  predetermined  by 
natural  causation  so  that  our  choice  is  purely  formal,  or 
has  our  choosing  been  itself  a  vera  causa  but  not  of  the 
natural  causation  species?  When  the  question  has  taken 
this  form  we  see  how  important  the  ethical  situation  itself 
becomes.  Let  us  review  its  elements.  On  the  one  side  we 
have  the  pressure  of  some  social  claim,  some  kind  of  con- 
duct that  is  to  be  performed.  The  situation  requires  me  to 
treat  this  man  justly,  to  be  truthful  in  this  relation  and  to 
do  the  honest  thing  in  the  other.  My  individual  conscious- 
ness assents  to  the  claims  and  they  become  obligatory.  My 
choice  to  do  is  determined  by  the  obligatoriness  of  the 
claim.  I  choose  to  do  because  it  is  my  duty.  The  immedi- 
ate sequence  in  my  action  is  this :  I  ought  to  do  this  action 
and  therefore  I  choose  to  do  it.  Now  if  the  situation  be 
real  and  my  choice  is  the  result  of  my  sense  of  duty,  I  have 
engaged  in  a  transaction  that  cannot  be  accounted  for  by 
natural  causation.  But  if  it  could  be  maintained  that  this 
is  the  situation  only  in  appearance,  while  on  a  deeper  view 
it  comes  out  that  everything  was  predetermined  and  that 
my  choice  could  be  predicted  on  the  principle  of  natural 


chap.  i.  ETHICAL  ACTIVITIES.  365 

causation,  then,  of  course,  my  choice  and  all  its  elements 
would  be  reduced  to  terms  of  natural  causation.  The 
whole  situation  turns  on  the  question  whether  its  cen- 
tral term,  the  sense  of  duty,  of  obligatoriness,  can  be 
resolved  into  a  pure  product  of  natural  causes.  We 
have  seen  how  it  arises  out  of  a  process  of  social  expe- 
rience and  how  it  is  a  function  in  general  of  the  social 
consciousness.  This,  as  we  have  already  seen  in  arguing 
the  first  point,  reduces  it  to  a  condition  of  relativity.  Now 
if  the  consciousness  of  community  be  really  relative,  what 
is  the  consequence?  One  of  these  consequences  which  we 
have  already  indicated  is  the  fact  that  the  social  movements 
as  a  whole  are  left  without  conscious  guidance ;  that  is,  to 
accident  and  blind  fate.  But  accident  and  blind  fate  are 
only  names  for  that  which,  in  the  last  analysis,  happens 
without  conscious  intention  or  design.  Let  us  substitute 
for  these  high-sounding  terms  the  phrase  natural  causation, 
and  we  shall  have  a  view  of  the  world  in  which  the  final 
agency  of  the  world  is  conceived  after  the  type  of  natural 
causation,  while  all  agency  of  the  conscious  type  would  be 
regarded  as  subordinate  and  relative.  Now  the  point 
which  we  wish  to  bring  out  clearly  here  is  this,  that  the 
reality  of  free  choice  as  a  form  of  agency  that  cannot  be 
reduced  to  terms  of  natural  causation,  depends,  in  the  last 
analysis,  on  the  question  whether  the  duty-motive  which 
calls  it  forth  is  nothing  more  than  a  function  of  the  social 
consciousness  of  the  individual.  We  have  seen  that  this  social 
consciousness  itself  is  unable  to  escape  relativity  and  the 
consequent  lapse  into  the  position  of  a  mere  phenomenon  of 
the  world  of  natural  causation,  unless  it  makes  an  appeal 
to  a  transcending  consciousness  in  which  it  is  able  rationally 
to  complete  itself  as  a  whole.  Here  in  the  ethical  sphere 
we  have  now  a  similar  issue.  If  obligatoriness  or  ought- 
ness  be  a  pure  function  of  the  social  consciousness,  then  in 
order  to  vindicate  its  reality  and  defend  itself  from  reduc- 
tion to  terms  of  natural  causation,  it  is  necessary  that  ethics 
should  join  with  the  social  consciousness  in  its  final  appeal 


366  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

to  a  supreme  court,  If  obligation  be,  in  the  last  analysis, 
and  in  its  unqualified  form,  the  function  of  a  consciousness 
that  conceives  and  determines  the  whole,  then  it  has  the 
right  to  take  its  stand  as  a  vera  causa,  and  no  reduction 
of  actions  to  terms  of  their  natural  antecedents  will  be  able 
to  alter  the  fact  that  to  act  from  a  sense  of  duty  is  to  act 
freely. 

It  is  not  proposed  here  to  go  into  detail  regarding  the 
other  ethical  categories.  That  of  freedom  may  be  taken  as  a 
type  of  all.  Combining  the  two  considerations  which  we 
have  elaborated  at  some  length,  it  will  become  clear,  I 
think,  that  ethics  cannot  be  regarded  as  purely  a  function 
of  sociality.  That  the  social  roots  are  important,  in  fact 
vital,  no  one  will  be  able  to  deny.  Morality  is  at  first  a 
social  product,  if  we  use  the  term  social  broadly  enough 
so  as  to  include  all  the  forces,  religious  and  otherwise ;  and 
it  has  roots  that  are  independently  religious  and  inherent 
in  the  nature  of  man  as  a  social  being.  But  the  attempt 
to  root  ethics  in  exclusively  social  soil  will  have  the  effect 
of  rendering  all  its  categories  purely  relative.  The  central 
category  of  obligation  itself  will  lose  its  unqualified  force, 
and  freedom  will  dissolve  into  a  mere  illusion  of  natural 
causation.  Such  a  result  would  be  deplorable,  inasmuch 
as  the  ethical  motive  supplies  the  principal  ground  for 
man's  assertion  of  his  true  individuality  in  a  world  where 
the  victorious  appearance  is  so  generally  on  the  side  of 
natural  causes.  If  conscious  volition  is  ever  to  assert 
itself  in  the  world  as  a  real  agency  it  would  seem  that  its 
one  golden  opportunity  arises  in  connection  with  the  claims 
of  duty. 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS. 

From  the  standpoint  of  duty  the  world  of  conscious  aetivi 
ties  is  not  only  one  of  individualism,  but  also  one  of 
pluralism.  The  proof  of  this  is  short  and  not  very  difficult. 
There  is  no  duty  that  is  not  the  duty  of  one  or  more  moral 
agents.  This  might  seem  to  be  contradicted  by  the  exist- 
ence of  public  duty  which  is  an  affair  of  the  community. 
But  we  have  seen  that  there  is  no  social  consciousness  apart 
from  that  which  is  borne  by  social  individuals.  The  com- 
munity, apart  from  its  collection  of  units,  exists  only  in  the 
consciousness  of  its  individual  members.  A  public  duty, 
then,  is  only  a  duty  which  imposes  a  common  obligation  on 
all  the  members  of  the  community.  Its  recognition  must 
be  in  the  consciousness  of  individuals  and  its  response  will 
be  a  response  of  individuals.  The  ethical  community  is 
thus  resolvable  into  a  plurality  of  individuals  making  a 
common  response  to  a  common  moral  appeal.  That  the 
ethical  individual  is  a  real  individual  and  not  a  mere  phe- 
nomenon, follows  from  the  doctrine  of  freedom  which  was 
developed  in  the  last  chapter.  If  moral  choice  be  a  vera 
causa,  then  the  ethical  self  that  makes  the  choice  is  real. 
But  the  ethical  world  is  also  one  of  pluralism.  The 
individual  that  is  real  must  also  be  an  existent  in  the  sense 
in  which  we  have  used  that  term  throughout  these  dis- 
cussions. If  at  any  point  it  becomes  a  mere  phenomenon 
of  something  else  it  loses  its  claim  to  real  existence.     Now, 

367 


368  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  ethical  individual  is  a  vera  causa  of  the  teleological 
type.  This  we  have  shown.  And  being  so,  its  existence 
cannot  be  resolved  into  the  phenomenal  series  of  natural 
causation.  As  a  vera  causa  it  maintains  itself  as  a  reai 
existent  of  its  own  type.  From  the  ethical  point  of  view, 
then,  the  logical  result  seems  to  be  pluralism,— a  world  whose 
being  resolves  itself  into  a  multitude  of  real  existents  of  the 
individual  type.  Not  only  does  this  seem  logical,  but  we 
see  no  valid  reason  why  it  should  not  be  accepted.  What 
else  should  the  ethical  world  be  than  a  plurality  of  real 
individuals?  That  is  the  veritable  presumption  of  moral 
action  and  it  is  shrunk  from  only  by  those  who  think  that 
its  admission  commits  them  to  pluralism  as  the  final  word  in 
philosophy.  We  shall  see,  however,  that  the  best  way  to 
overcome  pluralism  in  the  end  is  not  to  deny  it  in  its  own 
field.  Let  us  carry  our  study  of  the  ethical  situation  a 
step  further.  If  the  ethical  world  resolves  itself  into  a 
plurality  of  individual  agents  each  of  which  is  a  vera 
causa,  then  it  is  clear  that  we  have  a  body  of  co-existent 
individuals  interacting  in  the  mode  in  which  each  is  in- 
dividually a  vera  causa.  That  will  be  a  first  postulate  of  an 
ethical  world.  And  its  negative  demonstration  will  take 
the  form  of  a  reductio  ad  absurdum.  It  is  impossible  to 
conceive  an  ethical  world  as  continuing  to  exist  after  this 
form  of  interaction  has  been  eliminated.  But  we  have  seen 
that  ethics  is  a  form  of  sociality  and  that  the  pressure  of 
moral  obligation,— that  datum  which  translates  moral 
choice  into  a  vera  causa, — springs  directly  out  of  that  con- 
sciousness which  the  individual  members  of  the  community 
possess  in  common.  The  first  presupposition  of  the  ethical 
world  is,  therefore,  sociality,  which  may  be  defined  as  that 
form  of  interaction  in  which  each  of  the  interacting  units 
has  the  power  to  enter,  through  ideal  representation  and 
sympathy,  into  the  conscious  life  of  every  other  unit  and 
which  has  the  effect,  therefore,  of  developing  a  conscious- 
ness of  community  as  a  common  medium  for  joint  activity 
and  organization. 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  369 

From  this  point  of  view  it  would  seem  that  one  may  be 
a  pluralist  in  his  theory  of  existence  and  in  his  ethics  with- 
out thereby  becoming  liable  to  the  drastic  treatment  which 
Professor  Koyce  administers  to  him  in  what  might  be 
called  his  "short  and  easy  way  with  realists."1  The 
assumption  that  a  plurality  of  existents  in  order  to  be  real 
must  be  mutually  exclusive,  like  the  Leibnitzian  monads, 
has  always  seemed  to  me  to  be  greatly  in  need  of  justification. 
Rather,  we  have  the  fact  of  r elatedness,  and  the  natural  pre- 
sumption of  this  is  a  plurality  of  existents.  What  right  have 
we  to  ignore  the  fact  in  developing  our  theory  of  the  nature 
of  the  being  that  underlies  the  fact?  Starting  with  the 
fact  that  there  is  relatedness,  it  is  open  to  us  to  conclude, 
hypothetically,  to  the  nature  of  the  terms  of  the  relation. 
But  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  all  the  conclusions  deriv- 
able in  such  reasoning  are  indirect  and  mediate,  while  on 
the  contrary  the  judgments  in  which  pluralism  is  affirmed 
take  the  form  of  immediate  inferences  from  data.  Thus  we 
have  seen,  in  the  analysis  of  the  various  forms  of  certitude, 
how  our  affirmation  of  the  real  existent  arises  as  an  im- 
mediate inference  from  data  in  consciousness.  Again,  the 
reality  of  the  ethical  individual  is  seen  not  to  be  hypothet- 
ical. Lastly,  the  reality  of  the  terms  of  the  relation  springs 
directly  from  the  fact  of  relatedness  itself.  If,  then, 
pluralism  be  an  immediate  deduction  from  relatedness,  it 
will  be  evident  that  a  theory  of  pluralism  that  denies  re- 
latedness is  founded,  in  part  at  least,  on  a  gratuitous  as- 
sumption. Let  us  dismiss  the  assumption,  then,  and  see 
how  pluralism  can  get  on  without  it.  We  are  now  in  the 
position  of  a  theory  that  has  reached  the  judgment  in  which 
a  plurality  of  existents  is  asserted  and  that  simply  awaits 
developments  in  order  to  determine  how  such  a  world  is 
going  to  get  its  plurality  organized  into  a  system.     For  it 

1 1   refer  to  his  Lectures  on  Realism  in  the  Gifford   Series,   The 
World  and  the  Individual.     I  am  not  holding  a  brief  here  for  any 
form    of    Realism    except    so    far    as    it    might    be    involved    in    the 
defense  of  Ethical  Pluralism. 
24 


370  M'XTIIKSIS.  PART  II. 

is  evident  that  the  vital  issue  here  is  not  some  abstract  con- 
sideration arising  out   of  the   nature   of  substance,  but 

rather  the  very  concrete  question  as  to  how  a  situation  that 
is  seen  to  be  both  intelligible  and  necessary  is  to  get  itself 
realized.  Now,  it  is  clear  that  if  we  have  not  in  the  mean- 
time permitted  ourselves  to  be  Logically  handicapped  by 

some  a  priori  presumption  as  to  the  nature  of  these  exist- 
ents, we  shall  not  be  surprised  if  we  find  the  fact  of  related- 
ness  showing  itself  in  experience.  In  truth,  it  is  just  this 
faet  of  relatedness  that  experience  has  most  thoroughly 
accustomed  us  to  and  we  should  be  astonished  if  we  found 
any  section  of  our  world  from  which  it  were  absent.  As- 
suming, then,  a  plurality  of  real  existents,  we  have  the  fact 
of  relatedness  arising  in  the  physical  world  in  those  rela- 
tions with  which  physics  deals  and  in  the  world  of  con- 
sciousness, in  those  relations  which  constitute  the  social 
medium.  Here,  of  course,  our  concern  is  with  the  world 
of  conscious  existents  where  the  fact  of  relatedness  ex- 
presses itself  in  the  social  nature  of  conscious  beings.  To 
the  question,  then,  how  a  plurality  of  real  existents  can 
overcome  their  isolation  and  effect  any  kind  of  intercourse 
we  have  simply  to  point  to  the  social  nature  which,  as  we 
have  seen,  is  a  congenital  possession  of  consciousness  and 
not  merely  an  acquired  characteristic.  In  short  an  ade- 
quate definition  of  man  will  be  one  that  includes  his  social 
nature.  In  defining  the  social  unit  it  would  be  no  greater 
oversight  to  leave  out  consciousness  than  it  would  be  in 
defining  a  conscious  being  to  leave  out  sociality. 

It  is  by  virtue  of  this  sociality,  then,  that  a  plurality  of 
psychic  existents  are  able  to  overcome  the  isolation  in- 
volved in  their  plurality  and  establish  a  common  medium 
for  intercourse  and  organization.  To  return,  then,  to  the 
ethical  problem,  we  have  seen  that  the  nature  of  the  ethical 
situation  is  such  as  to  involve  the  real  existence  of  a  plu- 
rality of  ethical  individuals.  There  is  no  escape  from  this 
conclusion  and  we  shall  find  that  any  expedient  we  may 
adopt  to  reduce  the  pluralism  of  the  situation  will  be  one 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  371 

that  also  reduces  its  ethical  efficiency.  The  pluralism  is 
one  of  individuality  and  existence.  But  pluralism  and 
distinct  individuality  do  not  constitute  the  whole  reality 
even  of  the  ethical  units  themselves.  The  fact  of  related- 
ness  is  pari  of  their  reality  and  this  expresses  itself  in 
their  common  attribute  of  sociality.  Tli  ■  matter  of  the 
individual  existent,  as  distinguished  from  the  form  of  his 
being,  is  seen  to  be  qualified  with  just  this  attribute  of 
sociality,  which  is  the  capacity  to  transcend  the  existential 
chasm  that  divides  him  from  his  fellow  and  to  enter, 
through  thought  and  feeling,  into  the  life  of  his  fellow. 
If  wTe  regard  this  sociality  as  an  original  endowmient  of  the 
individual  (and  why  should  we  not?)  we  shall  not  be  at  a 
loss  to  find  common  grounds  in  the  ethical  world  by  virtue 
of  which  isolated  individuality  is  overcome  and  the  world 
of  moral  agents,  while  remaining  plural  in  its  existence  and 
individuality,  finds  in  the  bond  of  sociality  the  basis  of 
common  life  and  organization. 

We  proceed  now  to  the  consideration  of  method  in 
ethics.  The  question  immediately  comes  up  here  as  to 
whether  there  can  be  a  science  of  ethics,  and  if  so,  what  the 
nature  of  that  science  will  be.  And  in  this  connection  we 
come  upon  the  debated  question  as  to  whether  a  natural 
science  of  ethics  be  possible,  and  if  so,  then  the  question 
as  to  its  limits.  Lastly,  we  have  the  problem  of  the  meta- 
physics of  ethics  and  of  the  synthesis  of  the  scientific 
and  the  metaphysical.  The  question  whether  a  science  of 
ethics  be  possible  or  not,  might  not  seem  to  be  open  in  view 
of  the  wide-spread  efforts  that  are  made  to  treat  ethical 
phenomena  under  the  rubrics  of  science.  In  fact,  on  per- 
fectly general  grounds  the  question  is  hardly  debatable 
and  it  is  not  likely  that  it  would  be  much  in  debate  were 
there  not  a  wide-spread  tendency  to  reduce  the  area  of  the 
question  by  claiming  that  a  natural  science  of  ethics  is 
possible.  Now,  we  have  seen  that  the  one  principle  of 
natural  science  is  that  of  natural  causation ;  for,  whatever 
construction  science  may  see  fit  to  put  on  the  principle  of 


372  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

natural  causation,  whether  it  tend  more  to  the  dynamic 
conception  of  causation,  or  to  that  of  Hume  who  reduces 
it  to  pure  antecedence  in  time,  it  is  the  universal  presump- 
tion of  natural  science  that  the  explanation  of  a  thing  is  to 
be  sought  in  its  antecedents,  that  is,  in  conditions  that  have 
preceded  it  in  time,  so  that  when  the  antecedents  of  a 
present  situation  have  been  adequately  determined,  the 
present  has  been  shown  to  be  predetermined.  The  prin- 
ciple of  natural  explanation  is  then  the  resolution  of  the 
activity  of  the  present  into  antecedent  conditions  by  which 
it  is  predetermined.  In  relation  to  present  agency  natural 
explanation  is,  then,  a  form  of  predeterminism. 

In  view  of  this,  it  is  clear  that  the  pivotal  point  of  a 
natural  science  of  ethics  would  be  found  in  its  denial  of 
freedom.  In  fact,  from  the  genuine  natural  science  point 
of  view,  there  is  no  room  for  serious  debate.  The  case  is  a 
perfectly  clear  one.  Freedom  is  pushed  ignominiously 
into  the  outer  court  of  the  gentiles  where  it  becomes  a 
byword  and  term  of  reproach.  That  ethical  choice  is  in 
any  sense  a  vera  causa,  that  there  is  anything  in  it  that  is 
not  reducible,  in  the  last  analysis,  to  terms  of  a  man's 
heredity  and  environment,  is  denied  with  such  vehemence 
that  one  is  led  to  suspect  that  such  a  way  of  thinking 
involves  in  some  way  a  scandal  to  science.  But  is  natural- 
ism so  very  sure  of  its  case  that  it  cannot  bear  contradic- 
tion? Let  us  seek  to  decide  this  by  analyzing  a  typical 
ethical  situation.  We  shall  take  Kant's  case  of  the  man 
who  is  tempted  to  tell  a  wicked  lie  in  order  to  secure  some 
great  personal  advantage  to  himself.  We  may  suppose 
that  he  has  reasonably  assured  himself  that  the  prospects 
of  being  found  out  are  not  great  and  that  he  is  therefore 
relatively  secure  against  the  ordinary  penalties  that  would 
follow  conviction  of  such  an  offense.  Now,  this  man  will 
either  yield  to  the  temptation  or  he  will  not.  In  the  former 
case  he  has  proved  recreant  to  his  duty  which  has  been 
denied  and  outraged  and  has  in  this  case  produced  no 
effect.     The  man  has  yielded  to  the  temptation  and  has 


chap.  II.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  373 

uttered  the  lie  for  the  sake  of  the  desirable  consequences. 
It  is  open  in  this  case  for  the  naturalist  to  claim  that  the 
choice  of  the  man  is  a  function  of  natural  causation  and 
was  predetermined  by  the  man's  environment  and  heredity. 
The  man  was  impelled  to  utter  the  lie  by  the  desirable 
object  it  would  secure  and  yielding  to  the  natural  force  of 
the  temptation  he  falls  into  sin. 

Suppose,  however,  that  in  spite  of  this  impulsion  he 
resists  the  temptation  and  refuses  to  tell  the  wicked  lie. 
In  this  case  duty  becomes  his  determining  motive  and  he 
repels  the  force  of  natural  desire  and  through  it  the  pre- 
determining influences  of  environment  and  heredity.  Is 
naturalism  still  prepared  to  say  that,  when  a  man  has 
resisted  impulse  and  chosen  to  obey  the  command  of  duty, 
his  choice  is  not  a  real  act  of  freedom  but  may  be  reduced 
to  an  instance  of  natural  causation?  Then,  in  the  first 
place,  he  needs  to  be  reminded  that  the  bearing  of  natural 
causation  in  its  direct  form  will  be  through  the  channel  of 
desire.  The  desirable  will  be  in  general  that  to  which  a 
man  is  hereditarily  disposed  and  his  impulsive  nature  as  a 
whole  is  likely  to  press  in  favor  of  the  desirable  object. 
The  environment  may,  of  course,  contain  forces  that  will 
bear  against  the  gratification  of  desire.  But  we  have  pro- 
vided for  this  negative  influence  in  the  supposition  that  the 
man  is  reasonably  sure  of  immunity  from  its  operation. 
The  case  is  one,  in  fact,  in  which  a  man  is  left  to  fight  out 
his  battle  between  desire  and  duty  without  outside  inter- 
ference. If  he  yields  to  desire  he  nullifies  the  command 
of  duty;  if  he  does  his  duty  he  resists  and  nullifies  desire. 
On  which  side  of  this  battle  do  we  clearly  find  natural 
causation  operating?  Certainly  on  the  side  of  natural 
desire.  This  embodies  the  trend  of  the  man's  nature, 
and  natural  causation  may  be  regarded  as  predetermin- 
ing a  result  that  is  in  accordance  with  the  hereditary 
trend  of  the  organism.  But  in  the  case  of  the  decision 
for  duty  and  the  defeat  of  desire,  it  is  reasonable  to 
suppose   that   natural   causation  has   failed   to   determine 


374  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  choice  and  that  some  other  principle  has  been  vic- 
torious. 

There  is  one  general  fact  that  naturalism  is  accustomed 
to  completely  overlook,  and  that  is  the  tremendous  revolu- 
tion which  reflection  introduces  into  the  volitional  world. 
In  the  field  of  the  spontaneous  it  may  be  conceded  that  the 
desirable  will  always  be  chosen;  though  even  here  the 
genetic  psychologists  are  showing  us  that  the  accommoda- 
tions of  the  organism  are  not  always  in  the  direction  of  the 
habitually  desirable,  but  that  predispositions  are  constantly 
being  modified  by  the  accession  of  the  new.  However, 
conceding  the  spontaneous  to  the  naturalist  for  the  sake 
of  the  argument,  we  find  that  the  one  characteristic  of 
reflection  in  the  volitional  field  is  the  power  to  inhibit 
impulse  and  desire.  When  consciousness  becomes  reflect- 
ive, then  impulse  and  desire  no  longer  have  complete  right 
of  way.  It  is  the  business  of  reflection  to  bring  choice 
consciously  into  the  presence  of  ideals,  and  the  determina- 
tion of  these  ideals  is  also  the  province  of  reflection.  In 
reflection  we  do  not  determine  simply  the  desirable ;  we  go 
deeper  than  this  and  determine  what  shall  be  desirable. 
There  is  something  prescriptive  as  well  as  prospective,  in 
reflection.  And  to  this  prescribed  ideal  man  finds  that  he 
has  power  to  conform  his  decisions  and  actions.  Now,  I 
am  not  about  to  develop  here  a  general  doctrine  of  freedom 
based  on  man's  power  to  prescribe  and  follow  ideals;1 
though  I  should  like  to  venture  an  opinion  that  whatever 
freedom  man  has  is  something  to  be  discovered  by  analyz- 
ing his  actual  experience  and  not  to  be  either  deduced  or 
refuted  on  a  priori  grounds.  What  we  are  about  to  do  here 
is  to  admit  as  possible,  merely  for  the  sake  of  the  argument, 
that  reflective  choice  which  results  in  the  choice  of  the 
desirable  as  such  may  be  handed  over  to  the  naturalist  as  a 
case  where  in  the  end  the  tendency  of  natural  causation 
has  been  furthered.     If  it  is  the  tendency  of  natural  causa- 

1  In  Part  IV  I  do  make  an  attempt  to  develop  such  a  doctrine 
on  the  basis  here  indicated. 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  375 

tion  to  lead  to  the  desirable,  then  wherever  the  desirable  is 
attained  it  will  be  a  possible  result  of  natural  causes,  al- 
though it  will  also  possibly  be  a  case  of  coincidence  where 
the  effect  has  actually  resulted  from  some  non-natural 
cause. 

But  let  us  suppose  that,  as  in  case  of  the  ethical  decision, 
the  reflective  ideal  that  determines  the  choice  is  not  an 
idealized  form  of  the  desirable,  but  that  its  pressure  is  of 
such  a  character  that  it  puts  a  curb  on  desire  and  impulse, 
not  in  the  behoof  of  something  ideally  desirable  so  that  it 
supplies  a  higher  inducement  to  desire  and  impulse  them- 
selves, but  in  behoof  of  an  ideal  that  claims  absolute 
control  over  impulses  and  desires  and  in  this  case  exercises 
this  control  in  defeating  them.  This  is  the  real  situation 
as  it  rises  in  experience  rather  than  in  the  speculation  of 
abstract  theory.  When  I  decide  in  accordance  with  the 
ethical  ideal  and  choose  to  do  my  duty,  natural  causation 
and  its  law  are  set  aside  and  my  decision  to  do  my  duty 
embodies  a  vera  causa  of  a  different  type.  For  it  is  true 
that  something  has  come  to  pass  in  experience  which 
natural  causation  has  not  effected  and  could  not  explain. 
If  now,  in  order  to  turn  the  force  of  the  reasoning  here, 
the  old  saw  be  brought  in  and  we  be  told  that '  *  after  all  the 
law  of  desire  has  been  fulfilled,  for  does  not  the  moral  man 
prefer  to  do  his  duty  and  find  his  highest  satisfaction  in  its 
performance,  and  would  he  not  be  perfectly  miserable  if  he 
allowed  himself  to  violate  his  conscience,"  we  answer, 
this  is  true  enough  and  there  is  a  sense  in  which  virtue  is 
its  own  reward.  But  after  all  it  is  a  question  of  fact ;  and 
I  would  ask  in  return,  when  it  comes  right  down  to  the 
square  issue,  what  is  the  virile  factor  in  the  motive  of  a 
real  ethical  choice?  I  say  real  ethical  choice  in  order  to 
differentiate  it  from  the  disguised  choice  of  prudence  on  the 
one  hand,  and  from  that  of  the  moral  pharisee  on  the  other 
hand,  that  species  of  ethical  mugwump,  who  prides  himself 
more  on  the  sense  of  freedom  and  superiority  which  his 
action  breeds  in  him  than  in  the  character  of  the  action  per- 


376  SYNTHESIS.  paet  ii. 

formed.  If  we  take  a  real  ethical  choice  like  that  of  the  man 
in  the  instance  who  fights  out  to  a  finish  the  battle  between 
duty  and  desire,  would  not  such  a  man  laugh  to  scorn  any 
one  who  might  try  to  convince  him  that  after  all  he  had 
decided  in  favor  of  the  most  desirable?  There  can  be  no 
shadow  of  doubt  in  the  matter.  In  the  thick  of  the  conflict 
itself  the  man  is  sure  that  the  virile  factor  in  his  motive 
was  the  immediate  pressure  of  the  stern  obligation  of  duty. 
The  force  of  desire  was  pulling  hard  in  an  opposite  direc- 
tion and  had  to  be  flatly  denied  in  deciding  for  duty.  After 
yielding  everything  that  naturalism  could  reasonably  claim, 
we  submit  that  ethical  decision  where  the  lines  are  clearly 
drawn,  as  in  the  above  instance,  will  always  be  a  Waterloo 
to  the  claim  that  ethics  may  be  a  purely  natural  science. 

This  conclusion,  however,  does  not  foreclose  the  case 
against  ethics  being,  in  part,  a  natural  science,  and  the  ques- 
tion we  are  about  to  take  up  in  this  section  is  this :  In  what 
sense  is  ethics  to  be  regarded  as  a  science,  and  how  far  may 
it  be  dealt  with,  if  at  all,  under  the  rubrics  of  natural 
science  ?  Now  in  dealing  with  matter  that  is  ethical  we  are 
very  soon  struck  with  the  fact  that  what  we  are  directly 
aiming  to  determine  is  not  what  actually  is,  but  what  ought 
to  be,  and  the  ought  to  be  is  what  is  to  become.  In  other 
words,  we  are  dealing  with  something  ideal,— with  some- 
thing that  is  both  prescriptive  and  prospective.  A  science 
that  undertakes  to  prescribe  what  is  to  become,  whether 
the  prescription  be  to  the  understanding  as  in  the  case  of 
logic,  to  the  will  as  in  the  case  of  ethics,  or  to  the  imagina- 
tion as  in  art,  the  same  is  called  normative  rather  than 
material  or  natural.  From  this  point  of  view  we  should 
call  physics,  chemistry,  biology,  psychology,  material 
sciences,  while  to  logic,  ethics,  and  aesthetics  we  should 
apply  the  term  normative.  A  normative  science  deals 
with  an  ideal  which  it  aims  to  construct  as  a  guide  to  judg- 
ment or  action  in  its  field,  and  its  whole  procedure  rests  on 
the  presupposition  of  standards  or  criteria  of  this  ideal 
that  are  attainable.     In  view,  then,  of  the  fact  that  it  deals 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  377 

with  ideals  of  conduct  and  aims  to  develop  criteria  by 
means  of  which  the  correspondence  of  action  with  these 
ideals  may  be  determined,  ethics  is  to  be  ranked  as  a 
normative  rather  than  a  material  science. 

A  normative  science  is,  then,  a  science  of  ideals,  and 
these  involve  standards  or  criteria  for  the  determination  of 
the  conduct  that  will  conform  to  the  ideals  in  question. 
There  are  those,  however,  who  have  refused  to  recognize 
the  validity  of  the  distinction  between  material  and 
normative  sciences.  Every  science  is  material  in  the  sense 
that  it  deals  immediately  with  what  is.  The  so-called 
normative  science  is  only  an  art.  Thus  logic,  so  far  forth 
as  it  differs  from  psychology,  is  an  art,  and  ethics,  beyond 
the  point  where  it  ceases  to  be  a  natural  science,  is  a  mere 
art  of  conduct.  These  critics  fail,  however,  to  observe  an 
important  distinction.  An  art  like  architecture,  for  ex- 
ample, is  made  up  of  a  system  of  rules.  The  most  general 
of  these,  which  we  call  principles,  are  only  rules  that 
apply  to  all  kinds  of  structures  and  to  all  kinds  of 
materials.  The  real  principles  involved  are  laws  of  the 
different  kinds  of  material  that  are  used,  together  with  the 
laws  of  space,  matter  and  the  pressure  of  the  medium  in 
which  the  structure  is  built.  The  real  principles  of  archi- 
tecture will  constitute  its  scientific  basis  and  will  in  general 
be  the  laws  of  physics  and  mathematics.  If  the  idea  of 
beauty  enters  in,  as  it  will  in  all  advanced  architecture, 
then  the  laws  of  aesthetics  will  be  drawn  upon.  But  the 
characteristic  of  an  art  is  that  its  real  principles  are  the 
laws  of  the  sciences  on  which  it  depends,  while  its  so-called 
principles  are  simply  its  most  general  prescripts  of  pro- 
cedure. If  we  take  a  real  normative  science  like  ethics  or 
logic,  however,  we  shall  find  that  while  logic  is  dependent 
on  psychology,  for  example,  for  the  genetic  history  of  its 
concepts,  yet  its  principles  are  derived  directly  from  the 
study  of  consciousness  as  an  organ  of  knowledge.  Logic 
may,  therefore,  have  some  difficulty  in  distinguishing  itself 
from  epistemology,  but  very  little  in  distinguishing  itself 


378  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

from  psychology.  Likewise,  ethics  will  be  able  to  vindi- 
cate its  claim  to  being  a  real  normative  science,  since  it  is 
not  only  a  science  of  ideals  of  conduct,  but  its  principles 
can  be  derived  from  no  other  source  than  the  study  of 
ethical  experience.  That  man  is  a  moral  being  is  a  given 
fact,  and  the  problems  of  the  ideals  of  moral  conduct  and 
the  principles  of  moral  conduct  find  their  answer  in  the 
study  of  moral  conduct  itself.  Even  in  case  where  an 
appeal  has  to  be  made  back  of  moral  conduct,  it  is  to  con- 
sciousness in  some  broader  form  of  its  experience,  and 
consciousness  itself  is  teleological  in  its  movements.  There 
are  ethical  rules  founded  on  its  principles  which  lie 
properly  within  the  sphere  of  the  art  of  conduct,  just  as 
there  are  logical  prescripts  founded  on  the  principles  of 
reasoning  which  properly  belong  to  the  art  of  reasoning. 
But  in  both  instances  the  normative  science  underlies  the 
art  and  makes  it  possible. 

Now  the  question  whether  ethics  can  be  regarded  in 
any  sense  as  a  natural  science  and,  if  so,  in  what  sense  and 
to  what  extent,  can  be  determined  only  by  settling  the 
claims  between  the  concepts  of  the  natural  and  the  norma- 
tive. If  we  define  a  natural  science  as  one  whose  principle 
of  explanation  is  that  of  natural  causation  in  the  broad 
sense  in  which  we  have  used  the  term  in  this  treatise,  then 
it  is  clear  that  a  science  that  is  really  normative  will  stand 
outside  the  category  of  natural.  For  a  normative  science 
is  a  science  whose  object  is  the  reflective  consciousness  in 
some  phase  of  its  activity.  Thus  the  matter  of  ethics  is 
that  species  of  practical  activity  which  has  for  its  center  the 
notion  of  duty.  The  movements  and  processes  of  the  eth- 
ical consciousness  will  therefore  be  ideal  and  teleological. 
In  other  words,  ethics  is  a  science  of  practical  teleology  so 
far  as  it  is  involved  in  the  idea  of  duty.  In  its  normative 
aspect  it  is  the  business  of  ethics,  therefore,  to  determine 
reflectively  the  ideals  of  conduct  and  in  view  of  these  the 
principles  of  the  science.  The  only  practical  method  will 
be  the  reflective  study  of  moral  experience  itself,  and  that 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  379 

will  include  an  investigation  not  only  of  the  forms  it  takes 
in  the  mature  experience  of  grown  up  men,  but  also  its  less 
mature  forms  as  illustrated  in  the  child  and  the  unde- 
veloped adult.  But  inasmuch  as  the  science  as  normative 
is  distinctively  reflective,  it  will  be  found  that  the  function 
of  critical  reflection  will  have  a  larger  use  in  ethics  than  in 
any  of  the  material  sciences. 

We  are  now  in  a  position,  I  think,  to  consider  the  ques- 
tion how  far,  if  at  all,  ethics  can  be  treated  as  a  natural 
science.  We  have  seen  that  the  normative  character  of 
ethics  results  from  its  reflective  character.  Ethical  choice 
is  a  function  of  reflection,  and  this  translates  it  into  a 
teleological,  an  ideal-seeking,  activity.  The  possible  rela- 
tion of  ethics  to  natural  causation  would  not  arise,  then, 
within  the  reflective  activity  itself,  but  rather  out  of  the 
relation  of  the  reflective  to  the  spontaneous  in  experience. 
It  is  here,  I  say,  that  we  are  to  seek  a  function  of  natural 
causation,  if  it  is  to  be  found  at  all.  Now  there  is  a  wide- 
spread belief  that  genesis  is  always  a  function  of  natural 
causation,  and  that  ethics,  so  far  forth  as  it  can  be  genet- 
ically treated,  will  fall  completely  under  the  dominion  of 
natural  causation.  It  is  to  this  belief,  mainly,  that  is  due  the 
extreme  reluctance  of  many  ethical  thinkers  to  admit  any 
vital  connection  between  ethics  and  evolution.  The  pre- 
sumption is  that  evolutionary  ethics  means  the  ethics  of 
natural  causation.  This  presumption  is  strengthened  also 
by  the  fact  that  the  most  influential  exponents  of  evolu- 
tionary ethics  take  this  very  position  and  deny  freedom  in 
the  interests  of  natural  causation.  But  a  little  reflection 
will  be  sufficient  to  show  that  genesis  and  natural  causation 
are  not  inseparable,  that  in  fact  they  are  separable  and  we 
have  distinguished  examples  of  their  separation.  The  his- 
tory of  any  form  of  theory,  for  example,  will  exemplify  an 
evolution  that  is  determined  by  the  laws  of  logical  sequence 
rather  than  by  natural  causation.  It  would  be  absurd  to 
suppose,  for  example,  that  the  development  of  modern 
political  economy  since  Adam  Smith  had  been  determined 


380  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

mainly  by  natural  causation  and  not  by  the  reflective  study 
of  economic  conditions.  Again,  the  development  of  philo- 
sophical theory  from  Socrates  to  Aristotle,  or  from  Kant  to 
Hegel,  while  it  was  no  doubt  vitally  related  in  an  indirect 
way  to  spheres  of  natural  causation,  was  actually  de- 
termined by  the  laws  of  consecutive  logical  thinking. 
Growth  and  development  may  be  spiritual  or  logical  in 
their  character  and  in  the  laws  which  they  obey,  as  well  as 
naturalistic  and  under  the  law  of  natural  causation.  What 
we  say  here,  then,  is  that  the  spheres  of  evolution  and 
natural  causation  do  not  necessarily  coincide,  and  that 
when  we  have  admitted  that  ethics  has  a  genetic  aspect  we 
have  not  to  that  extent  admitted  its  subordination  to  the 
law  of  natural  causation.  The  question  as  to  the  scope  of 
natural  causation  would  still  be  open  and  can  only  be 
settled  by  investigating  it  on  its  own  merits. 

That  ethics  has  a  genetic  aspect  is  scarcely  any  longer 
a  debatable  question.  The  genetic  psychologists,  and 
especially  the  students  of  child-psychology,  have  not  only 
shown  that  there  is  a  process  of  growth  in  the  ethical  con- 
ceptions of  the  child,  but  have  also  been  successful  in  a 
measure  in  indicating  its  main  stages  and  some  of  the 
important  conditions  of  its  growth.  The  results  of  genetic 
psychology  are  confirmatory,  moreover,  of  the  more  gen- 
eral representation  of  race-progress  which  we  derive  from 
history  and  the  historical  sciences.  In  this  race-progress 
ethics  has  shared,  and  such  a  writer  as  Lecky  in  his  His- 
tory of  European  Morals  has  shown  that,  on  its  practical 
side  at  least,  as  part  of  the  life  of  humanity,  morality  has 
passed  through  the  stages  of  an  evolution.  Let  us  suppose, 
then,  that  in  some  real  sense  the  principle  of  evolution  has 
been  exemplified  in  the  history  of  man's  ethical  experience. 
It  will  follow  that  we  shall  find  certain  universal  categories 
of  the  evolution-process  as  a  whole,  exemplified  here  as 
elsewhere.  Now  these  categories  are  development,  heredity, 
variation,  and  selection,  and  the  question  here  is,— How  does 
the  history  of  man's  ethical  experience   exemplify  these 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  381 

categories?  It  will  not  be  necessary  to  treat  all  the 
categories  in  detail,  since  if  there  has  been  real  develop- 
ment it  must  have  taken  place  through  the  agencies  of 
selection  and  variation,  and  the  whole  question  of  the 
nature  of  the  evolution  would  be  determined  by  our  con- 
clusions regarding  the  nature  of  selection  and  variation  as 
ethical  categories.  It  seems  clear  that  the  whole  issue  is  at 
stake  here.  Taking  the  category  of  variation  to  begin 
with,  it  is  clear  that  the  whole  fortune  of  evolution  in 
general  is  staked  on  the  occurrence  of  variations.  What, 
then,  is  a  variation  in  ethics  and  how  does  it  arise?  We 
have  seen  that  social  variation  in  general  arises  as  the 
thought  of  some  individual  and  that  it  is  in  its  initiative 
an  individual  function;  not  only  so,  but  it  is  a  function  of 
thought  or  reflection.  There  may  be,  and  no  doubt  are, 
social  variations  that  are  spontaneous.  But  among  men 
the  ordinary  fruitful  variation  is  the  product  of  some- 
body's reflection  on  the  social  situation.  It  will  arise  in 
the  effort  to  improve  conditions  that  are  at  present  unsat- 
isfactory, and  the  variation  will  appear  as  the  embodiment 
of  the  individual's  thought  of  betterment  and  will  take  the 
form  of  some  social  programme  to  be  realized.  Now,  we 
have  seen  that  ethical  experience  arises  as  a  function  of  the 
reflective  social  consciousness.  There  can  be  no  question, 
then,  as  to  the  ethical  initiative  whether  it  be  spontaneous 
or  reflective.  More  distinctively  than  in  the  case  of  the  ordi- 
nary social,  it  will  be  the  function  of  some  individual,  and 
it  will  be  a  reflectively  conceived  programme  proposed  as 
an  ideal  of  conduct  to  reflection.  Thus  when  Jesus  said  to 
the  harkening  Jews,  ' '  Ye  have  heard  it  said,  Thou  shalt  not 

commit  adultery But  I  say  unto  you  whosoever  look- 

eth  upon  a  woman  to  lust  after  her  hath  already  committed 
adultery  with  her  in  his  heart,"  he  supplied  a  representa- 
tive instance  of  the  ethical  variation  and  the  mode  of  its 
rise.  It  arises  as  the  programme  or  pronunciamento  of 
some  individual  or  small  group  of  individuals,  and  it  is 
enjoined  as  a  new  ethical  concept  or,  as  in  the  case  here,  a 


382  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

new  interpretation  of  an  old  one.  Allowing  for  indefinite 
change  of  circumstance  and  conditions,  the  law  of  ethical 
variation  may  be  said  to  be  exemplified  in  this  instance. 
Under  this  law,  however,  all  sorts  of  variations  may  arise. 
It  is  broad  enough  to  cover  ethical  precepts  all  the  way 
down  from  the  sublime  instance  cited  to  those  of  Mother 
Jones  and  Coxey  of  our  own  time.  Where  there  is 
free  variation  there  must  be  selection  in  order  that  there 
may  be  rational  progress.  What,  then,  is  the  nature  of 
ethical  selection,  and  how  is  the  function  exercised?  We 
are  here  touching  one  of  the  burning  issues  of  ethics.  We 
know  how  Huxley  stirred  the  moral  world  by  denying  the 
ethical  character  of  natural  selection  while  maintaining 
that  ethics  is  the  product  of  evolution.  Now,  Huxley  was 
right  in  regard  to  natural  selection,  provided  his  assump- 
tion be  true  that  natural  selection  is  an  affair  of  natural 
causation.  If  this  be  true,  as  is  indisputably  the  case  in 
biology,  then  the  principle  of  natural  selection  is  clearly 
non-ethical— if  not  anti-ethical,  as  Huxley  maintains.  But 
in  order  to  avoid  mere  verbal  difficulties  arising  out  of 
differences  of  terminology,  we  should  say  that  the  vital 
issue  here  is  a  question  of  principles.  Is  all  selection  a 
function  of  natural  causation  or  is  it  not  ?  And  if  not,  what 
is  its  principle?  We  feel  when  we  get  the  question  stated 
in  this  way  that  we  are  on  solid  ground.  In  the  study  of 
social  selection  we  found  that  the  unmodified  concepts  of 
biology  are  not  applicable,  and  for  this  reason,  that  social 
selection  is  not  only  a  function  of  consciousness  but  also  of 
some  form  of  conscious  reflection.  When  Jesus  was  speak- 
ing to  his  audience  they  no  doubt  felt  their  hearts  burning 
within  them.  This  was  the  immediate  response  of  the 
moral  intelligence  of  the  group  he  was  addressing,  in  the 
intellectual  labor  of  trying  to  understand  the  new  inter- 
pretation. Using  the  terms  of  evolution,  we  may  say  it 
was  the  effort  of  the  group  to  accommodate  itself  intel- 
lectually to  the  new  proposal.  But  this  does  not  represent 
the  whole  process  of  accommodation.     Only  when  the  new 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  383 

idea  leads  to  a  new  resolve,— to  a  change  of  will  and  prac- 
tical attitude  that  insures  a  change  in  conduct,— has  the 
process  of  accommodation  completed  itself.  Now,  this 
process  of  accommodation  is  all  the  selection  that  is  exer- 
cised. If  it  fails  to  take  place  or  acts  in  an  opposite 
direction  from  the  suggestion— which  is  possible— the 
variation  is  rejected,  or  at  least  not  taken  np,  and  fails  to 
become  fruitful.  If  we  study  the  situation,  we  shall  find 
that  the  steps  involved  in  this  act  of  accommodation  by  the 
individuals  of  the  group  are  as  follows.  The  prescript  of 
the  individual  comes,  in  the  first  place,  as  a  suggestion  to 
the  intellect,  and  its  selection  will  involve,  (1)  the  effort  to 
understand  the  suggestion.  The  suggestion  must  be  trans- 
lated into  a  "  self  -thought-situation "  as  a  condition  of  the 
possibility  of  any  further  progress.  (2)  Having  reflectively 
mastered  the  suggestion  in  some  intelligent  thought  or  idea 
of  it,  the  next  stage  is  the  one  in  which  the  experience  be- 
comes ethical  on  the  part  of  the  listening  group.  The  new 
interpretation  comes  not  simply  as  a  representation  contain- 
ing a  piece  of  information;  it  comes  also  as  a  prescript. 
The  matter  that  is  asserted  in  the  proposition  is  one  that, 
through  the  intellect  appeals  to  the  moral  conscious- 
ness, or  to  the  conscience  as  we  now  shall  call  it.  And  the 
moral  fate  of  the  proposition  will  rest  on  the  response  of 
conscience.  But  the  proposition  will  also  make  an  appeal 
to  the  desires.  The  programme  it  proposes  will  doubtless 
seem  too  difficult  to  what  we  may  call  the  natural  man. 
His  carnal  impulses  and  desires,  at  any  rate,  will  be  dead 
against  it.  What  we  are  making  out  here  primarily,  how- 
ever, is  the  fact  that  the  moral  suggestion  will  appeal  not 
only  to  conscience,  but  also  to  natural  desire.  And  the 
result  of  this  double  appeal  will  be  the  rise  of  the  typical 
ethical  situation.  For  there  are  just  two  alternatives  that 
can  arise:  either  conscience  and  desire  will  agree  or  they 
will  disagree.  The  first  alternative,  which  must  be  ad- 
mitted to  be  the  more  rare,  is  one  also  out  of  which  little 
fruitful  insight  can  be  gained.     Were  all  life  smooth  sail- 


384  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

ing  it  would  not  occur  to  any  one  to  take  deep  soundings. 
It  is  only  the  case  of  disagreement  that  supplies  fruitful 
instances.  Now,  we  may  define  conscience  as  ivill  determin- 
ing itself  by  duty,  and  desire  as  will  determining  itself  by 
the  agreeable.  It  is  clear  that  the  idea  of  duty  and  that  of 
the  agreeable  may  conflict  and  that  they  do  conflict.  In 
the  instance  of  the  new  interpretation  of  the  moral  law, 
the  situation  will  doubtless  be  that  of  conflict.  The  carnal 
man  at  least  will  rebel  and  this  rebellion  will  be  shared  in 
by  the  sensuous  nature  of  the  individual  and  the  sensuous 
tendencies  of  the  community.  But  conscience  will  assent 
to  it,  and  this  assent  will  carry  with  it  not  only  the  moral 
approval  of  the  individual  but  also  that  of  the  conscience 
of  the  community.  The  assent  that  turns  the  prescript 
into  an  obligation  to  both  the  individual  and  the  com- 
munity will  be  the  individual's  and  the  community's 
accommodation  to  a  new  idea  of  duty.  The  moral  assent 
which  transforms  the  prescript  of  external  authority  into 
internal  obligation  and  duty  is  thus  identical  with  the 
process  which  on  one  side  we  call  selection,  on  the  other, 
accommodation.  The  dilemma  out  of  which  it  arises,— 
that  of  a  conflict  between  the  moral  and  the  sensuous 
natures,— lifts  it  mentally  above  the  level  of  spontaneity 
into  that  of  reflection  and  makes  it  certain  that  the  debate 
out  of  which  the  decision  is  to  come  will  be,  on  the  part  of 
the  individual  and  community,  an  affair  of  reflection  and 
deliberate  choice.  For  in  the  very  nature  of  the  case, 
while  it  might  be  possible  for  both  the  individual  and  the 
community  to  be  reformed  without  knowing  it,  it  would  be 
absurd  to  suppose  that  moral  reformation  could  come  to 
either  the  individual  or  the  community  through  any  other 
channel  than  that  of  its  intelligent  choice. 

Similar  conclusions  await  us  when  we  come  to  consider 
the  problem  of  moral  heredity.  We  are  not  concerned  here 
directly  with  those  congenital  physical  conditions  which 
tend  to  induce  predispositions  or  tendencies  in  the  mental 
field.     The  indirect  bearing  of  the  biological  on  the  social 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  335 

and  ethical  is  recognized,  and  we  shall  have  something  to 
say  about  it  in  another  place.  But  we  have  seen  that  social 
heredity  is  a  very  different  thing  from  physical  heredity, 
that  there  is  little  in  it  analogous  to  the  congenital  in 
biology.  The  social  inheritance  is  simply  the  patrimony 
of  institutions,  laws  and  instruments  of  culture  which  one 
generation  hands  down  to  the  next.  And  the  only  security 
it  has  that  this  patrimony  shall  not  be  wasted  or  ignored 
altogether,  rests  in  the  fact  that  its  life  overlaps  that  of  the 
new  generation  long  enough  to  enable  it  to  translate  its 
riches  into  an  actual  possession  of  the  new  generation. 
Beyond  this  function  of  education,  a  large  part  of  which 
lies  outside  the  field  of  the  new  generation's  intelligent 
assent,  there  can  be  little  doubt  as  to  the  fact  that  the  new 
generation's  relation  to  its  social  inheritance  is  not  in  any 
vital  sense  analogous  to  the  congenital  inheritance  of  phys- 
ical characteristics.  For  these  exercise  their  influence  out- 
side of  the  province  of  the  will,  whereas  the  new  generation 
chooses  what  shall  be  the  effect  of  its  social  inheritance. 
It  may  neglect  the  larger  part  so  that  it  lies  fallow  and 
does  not  influence  the  life  of  the  time.  It  may  exercise 
the  selective  function  and  assimilate  a  part,  and  then  we 
shall  witness  a  living  development  along  special  lines. 
Besides,  part  of  the  legacy  which  past  generations  have 
neglected  may  be  restored  and  revived  and  then  we  shall 
have  one  of  the  frequent  renascences  of  history.  It  is 
impossible,  then,  to  exclude  will  from  social  heredity  and 
reduce  it  to  a  pure  phenomenon  of  natural  causation. 

Much  more  will  this  be  the  case  in  moral  heredity  where 
the  issues  come  much  more  directly  into  the  province  of 
conscience  and  will.  For  if  we  leave  out  of  view  the  indi- 
rect effects  in  the  moral  sphere,  of  congenital  physical 
conditions,  we  shall  find  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  the 
transmission  of  moral  ideas  except  in  the  form  of  literature 
and  institutions,  and  through  the  medium  of  tuition.  We 
come  into  possession  of  no  moral  ideas  congenitally,  but 
these  come  to  us  so  far  as  we  inherit  them  at  all,  as  a 
25 


386  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

patrimony  the  use  of  which  may  be  largely  determined  by 
our  own  will.  And  the  fact  that  reflection  and  will  enter 
so  much  more  distinctively  as  factors  wherever  a  moral 
effect  is  produced,  than  they  do  into  any  other  kind  of  a 
result,  is  sufficient  to  make  it  clear  that  the  volitional 
cause  will  be  the  determining  one  wherever  a  distinctly 
moral  result  is  attained.  We  conclude,  then,  as  the 
outcome  of  this  part  of  our  discussion,  that  the  direct  forces 
of  moral  evolution  are  those  of  conscious  and  volitional 
agencies  and  that  nowhere  does  the  process  fall  completely 
into  the  hands  of  natural  causation.  This  was  found  to  be 
measurably  the  case  in  general  social  evolution,  but  it  is 
more  especially  true  of  moral  evolution  where,  in  view  of 
the  characteristic  nature  of  ethical  phenomena,  they  belong 
more  distinctively  to  the  species  of  reflective  activities. 

I  think  we  have  reached  a  point  here  where  some  intel- 
ligent conclusion  will  be  possible  on  the  general  question 
of  the  nature  of  ethical  science.  Putting  the  questions 
in  what  sense  and  how  far  ethics  can  be  treated  as  a 
natural  science,  if  we  identify  a  natural  science  with  a 
science  of  natural  causation  we  shall  be  led  to  the  following 
conclusion.  Ethics  can  be  treated  as  a  natural  science  only 
so  far  as  it  falls  indirectly  under  the  influence  of  natural 
causation  in  connection  with  biological  heredity  and  the 
influences  of  the  physical  environment.  We  have  already 
spoken  of  the  influence  of  biological  heredity  and  need  not 
enlarge.  It  is  scarcely  open  to  dispute  that  the  physical 
environment,  by  its  direct  influence  on  certain  conditions 
of  consciousness  (temperaments  and  moods  for  instance) 
will  exercise  an  indirect  influence  on  conduct  and  will  to 
some  extent  affect  moral  experience.  Through  tempera- 
ture, habitat,  food  supply  and  relative  ease  or  difficulty 
of  procuring  the  means  of  subsistence,  the  nature  of  man  is 
being  constantly  modified. 

Conditions  of  the  bodily  organism  outside  of  those  due 
to  congenital  causes  also  exercise  a  more  or  less  constant 
and  a  more  or  less  potent  indirect  influence  on  the  sphere  of 


chap.il  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  337 

conduct.  They  do  this  through  the  influence  they  exert 
in  determining  the  will  which  is  always  susceptible  to 
motives  from  these  regions,  as  well  as  by  the  part  they 
play  in  determining  the  emotional  point  of  view  from 
which  we  react  upon  life.  They  may  be  able  to  account 
for  the  whole  difference  between  despondency  and  ela- 
tion, moods  which  give  complexion  to  life  by  altering 
the  relative  force  of  motives  and  interests.  It  is  clear, 
then,  that  in  so  far  as  the  issues  of  moral  conduct  are 
indirectly  determined  by  natural  causes  operating  through 
biological  heredity  or  the  physical  environment,  it  may  be 
treated  as  a  natural  science.  Having  reached  this  con- 
clusion, our  opinion  as  to  the  limit  to  which  natural  science 
may  go  in  dealing  with  ethical  phenomena  will  be  de- 
termined by  our  judgment  as  to  the  importance  and  extent 
of  the  influence  of  these  agencies. 

Now,  it  must  not  be  forgotten  that  the  question  of  the 
limit  of  natural  science  in  the  treatment  of  ethics  is  not 
identical  with  the  question  of  evolution  and  its  scope  in  the 
moral  field.  For  we  have  just  concluded  that  the  concepts 
of  genesis  and  natural  causation  are  not  identical,  but  that 
genesis  and  history  may  be  found  in  regions  where  natural 
causation  does  not  directly  apply.  And  carrying  out  this 
view,  we  have  seen  how  a  doctrine  of  moral  evolution  may 
be  worked  out  in  which  the  direct  determining  forces  are 
reflection  and  will  and  not  natural  causation;  moreover, 
we  have  seen  in  detail  how  the  categories  of  selection, 
variation,  heredity  and  accommodation  become  real  cate- 
gories of  moral  progress  when  we  construe  them  in 
terms  of  reflection  and  will.  Clearly,  then,  there  is  a 
genetic  science  of  ethics  that  transcends  the  direct  limits 
of  natural  causation  and  looks  for  its  results  to  the  opera- 
tion of  forces  that  are  teleological  rather  than  mechanical. 
This  is  the  reason  why  the  genetic  treatment  of  ethics, 
when  it  gets  clear  from  the  superstition  that  has  bound 
it  to  natural  causation,  harmonizes  so  well  with  the  cate- 
gories  and   spirit   of  the   normative   branch   and   becomes 


388  SYNTHESIS.  PAET II. 

so  tributary  to  its  results.  A  doctriue  of  ethical  evolution 
founded  on  concepts  that  have  been  developed  critically 
in  the  light  of  moral  experience  itself  will  be  found  to 
be  just  the  complement  that  the  normative  science  needs. 
We  turn  now  to  the  question  of  the  metaphysics  of 
ethics.  The  question  as  to  whether  there  can  be  a  science  of 
ethics  apart  from  transcendent  considerations  may  now  be 
regarded  as  settled.  We  do  not  see  where  else  ethics  can  be 
rooted  except  in  the  social  nature  of  man.  And  if  it  has  its 
root  there,  then  a  science  of  ethics  becomes  possible.  If,  then, 
there  be  a  metaphysic  of  ethics,  it  will  not  come  as  a  rival 
candidate  for  our  favor  in  an  effort  to  displace  or  discredit 
science.  That  conception  of  metaphysics  may  be  consigned 
to  the  limbo  of  exploded  superstitions.  If  a  place  be 
found  for  a  metaphysic  of  ethics  it  will  be  because 
some  ethical  problems  still  survive  which  science  is  unable 
to  answer;  or,  if  you  will,  to  which  a  scientific  answer  is 
impossible.  And  that  is  no  discredit  to  science,  inasmuch 
as  it  is  simply  admitting  that  there  are  problems,— it  may 
be  of  a  very  pressing  nature,— for  which  no  answer  can  be 
reached  that  will  bear  the  kind  and  degree  of  certitude  for 
which  science  stands.  We  have  seen,  however,  in  earlier 
chapters  of  this  treatise  that  there  are  ultra-scientific  certi- 
tudes of  a  very  high  order,  and  the  faith  of  metaphysics  is 
that  the  answers  to  these  questions  may  be  brought  under 
some  of  these.  We  may  approach  the  metaphysical  prob- 
lem from  several  different  points  of  view.  One  of  these 
points  of  departure,  and  perhaps  the  most  important,  is 
found  in  the  central  category  of  ethics,  that  of  duty  or 
obligation.  We  have  seen  that  the  immediate  roots  of  the 
notion  of  duty  are  social,  and  that  the  obligatoriness  of  the 
fundamental  ethical  notions,  as  justice,  truthfulness  and 
honesty,  is  an  immediate  deduction  from  the  form  of 
sociality  itself.  We  find,  however,  in  dealing  with  the 
social  world,  that  there  is  a  point  where  the  social  move- 
ments transcend  the  ordinary  forces  of  social  organization, 
a   point   where    the    partial    movements    merge    into    the 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  389 

world-movements  as  a  whole.  In  view  of  this  it  was 
seen  that,  in  order  to  redeem  the  whole  social  world 
from  the  ultimate  reign  of  accident  or  blind  fate,  it  was 
necessary  to  connect  it  with  the  intelligence  and  purpose 
of  some  eternal  consciousness  which  is  capable  of  compre- 
hending and  ordering  the  whole.  Here  in  the  ethical  field 
we  meet  a  corresponding  alternative.  It  is  found  that  all 
communities  are  limited  and  partial  and  that  accessible 
forms  of  social  consciousness  are  therefore  relative,  and  if 
relative,  liable  to  change  and  modification  and  not  infal- 
lible. We  know,  of  course,  that  the  ethical  virtues,  being 
immediate  deductions  from  the  essential  form  of  sociality 
that  repeats  itself  everywhere,  are  generalizations  from 
data  that  are  accessible  to  us.  Yet  the  fact  that  the 
social  order  itself  contains  no  absolute  guarantee  of  its 
validity  but  must  have  recourse  ultimately  to  some  meta- 
physical ground— this  fact,  I  say,  so  affects  whatever  de- 
pends on  the  social  as  to  introduce  contingency  and  render 
it  at  last  relative.  What  shall  be  done  in  the  case  of  a 
dilemma  like  this  ?  Just  one  of  two  things ;  we  may  throw 
away  our  faith  in  the  social  order  and,  as  a  consequence,  in 
the  moral  order,  as  did  the  ancient  sophists  who  chose  the 
only  other  alternative  open  to  them,  a  world  of  social  and 
moral  accident  where  only  the  strong  had  any  chance  to 
survive  and  attain  their  ends  and  where  all  law  was  simply 
a  convention  of  the  weak;  or,  choosing  to  retain  that  faith 
as  the  only  ground  of  reason  and  order  to  be  found  in 
our  world,  we  may  be  led  to  the  opposite  alternative  of 
seeking  a  cure  for  ultimate  relativity  which  is  ultimate 
chaos,  in  the  postulate  of  an  eternal  consciousness,  a 
divine  reason  and  will,  in  which  our  relative  norms  find 
their  completion  and  ultimate  justification.  We  hold  that 
a  metaphysic  of  ethics  developed  from  such  a  point  of  view 
rests  on  grounds  which  science  itself  must  recognize  as 
rational,  whether  or  not  it  may  see  its  way  to  accepting  the 
solution.  Moreover,  science  too  has  a  relish  for  going  to 
the  bottom  of  things  and  finding  the  truth  in  some  startling 


390  SYNTHESIS.  PAET II. 

antithesis.  What  antithesis  could  then  be  more  startling 
than  the  discovery  we  have  made  here  that,  in  the  last 
analysis,  our  intelligence  in  facing  a  world  of  moral  issues 
finds  itself  in  presence  of  two  radically  opposite  alterna- 
tives, and  that  there  is  no  middle  ground.  It  must  either 
find  a  divine  intelligence  in  the  world  as  the  ground  and 
guarantee  of  its  moral  order,  or  it  must  dismiss  that  order 
as  a  figment  of  imagination  and  take  its  part  in  a  system- 
less  and  lawless  chaos  where  only  the  strength  that  is  able 
to  push  all  obstacles  out  of  its  way  has  any  chance  of 
attaining  its  end. 

Another  point  where  the  metaphysical  alternative  arises 
is  in  connection  with  the  relation  of  ethics  to  natural 
causation.  We  have  seen  that  those  who  treat  ethics  as  a 
natural  science  draw  the  logical  conclusion,  as  a  rule,  from 
this  point  of  view  and  deny  freedom  as  a  vera  causa,  claim- 
ing that  choice  is  purely  an  affair  of  physical  cause  and 
effect.  Even  the  most  refined  theorists  of  this  school,  who 
treat  the  relation  of  motive  to  choice  with  great  subtlety, 
are  never  able  to  transcend  the  notion  of  a  motive  as  a  cause 
acting  externally  to  the  will,  which  it  determines  to  action. 
The  notion  of  causation  by  self-determination  seems  to  be 
unthinkable  to  them,  and  while  in  every  normal  choice  of 
their  own  they  have  a  conscious  instance  of  a  result  that  is 
determined  not  by  the  push  of  a  cause  which  is  transcended 
in  the  effect  but  by  the  pull  of  the  effect  itself  which  comes 
into  a  state  of  self-realization;  they  are  unable  to  put  two 
and  two  together  and  discover  that  what  is  self-realization  in 
the  effect  is  self-determination  in  the  process.  The  metaphys- 
ical alternative  does  not  arise  directly  out  of  this  problem 
of  the  form  of  choice,  however,  since  this  is  a  question  of 
competence  in  the  sphere  of  a  properly  scientific  issue.  It 
is  not  impossible  that  the  most  bigoted  opponent  of  free- 
dom might  be  brought  as  the  result  of  sufficiently  competent 
analysis  to  admit  that  choice  is  self-determining  in  its 
form  and,  therefore,  formally  different  from  ordinary 
causation.     But  this  would  not  be  sufficient  to  convince  him 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  391 

that,  notwithstanding  the  difference  of  form,  choice  is  not 
after  all  reducible  to  a  case  of  natural  causation.  It  is 
here,  then,  in  connection  with  the  question  of  the  ultimate 
conditions  of  choice,  that  the  metaphysical  alternative 
arises  (I  have  called  it  a  metaphysical  alternative  because, 
as  I  am  about  to  show,  there  is  another  choice  possible  by 
means  of  which  metaphysics  may  be  avoided  altogether). 
Let  us  take  the  position  of  those  who  have  been  so  much 
impressed  with  the  reign  of  natural  causation  as  to  be  able 
to  find  no  other  form  of  agency  in  the  universe.  Regard- 
ing the  physical  order  of  events  in  time  as  the  only  real 
order  and  denying  the  reality  of  the  order  of  consciousness ; 
or  at  least  treating  it  as  an  epi-phenomenon  of  the  physical, 
the  sovereign  disposer  of  all  issues  in  their  view  is  natural 
causation.  When  it  comes  to  the  problems  of  conduct  these 
theorists  are  disposed  to  put  all  solutions  in  terms  of 
environment  and  heredity.  These  are  the  major  forces 
which  really  determine  all  the  issues,  and  these  are  taken  in 
their  biological  and  physical  sense  as  embodying  the  main 
lines  of  the  operation  of  physical  causes  in  so  far  as  they 
bear  on  human  conduct.  If  we  identify  ourselves  with 
their  point  of  view,  we  shall  begin  to  realize  the  force  of 
their  reasoning.  From  the  outer  physical  standpoint,  it 
does  seem  that,  in  comparison  with  the  operation  of  phys- 
ical forces,  no  other  kind  of  agency  is  worthy  of  serious 
consideration.  Viewed  in  relation  to  the  physical  forces,  a 
man 's  conduct  seems  to  be  the  function  of  what  he  eats  and 
of  the  material  agencies  that  enter  into  and  affect  his 
physical  constitution;  his  general  reaction  upon  life  de- 
pending on  his  digestion ;  his  conscience-reactions  being 
functions  of  his  liver,  and  his  ability  to  think  straight  a 
function  of  the  condition  of  the  brain.  The  brain  distils 
thought  as  the  cool  surface  in  the  warm  atmosphere  distils 
dew.  That  is  all.  Given  a  sound  bodily  organism  in  a 
good  environment  and  connected  with  favorable  congenital 
conditions   and  you  have  the   entire   causation   of  man's 


392  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

thoughts,  feelings,  purposes  and  actions.     His  conduct  is  an 
effect  of  which  these  are  the  only  real  causes. 

Now  whatever  force  there  may  be  in  this  mode  of  rep- 
resentation, it  is  clearly  one  not  open  to  us  who  believe  in 
the  reality  of  consciousness  and  have  accepted  the  Coper- 
nican  revolution  which  it  brings  into  the  world.  If  con- 
sciousness be  real,  then  it  is  competent  to  become  a  vera 
causa  in  the  world.  We  have  seen  how  the  recognition  of 
the  reality  of  consciousness  leads  to  its  enthronement  in  the 
primary  seat  of  power.  It  is  either  all  or  none  with  con- 
sciousness. And  we  have  followed  the  evolution  of  the 
world  under  the  supremacy  of  consciousness  up  to  the  point 
where,  in  the  form  of  the  ethical  choice  between  the  right 
and  wrong,  it  throws  down  the  gauntlet  to  the  physical 
forces  in  its  definite  assertion  of  itself  as  a  vera  causa.  We 
thus  come  back  to  the  pivotal  point  of  freedom  as  true 
causation.  And  the  whole  representation  from  the  stand- 
point of  the  physical  concentrates  on  this  one  point,  the 
denial  of  freedom,  or  at  least  the  denial  of  its  efficacy. 
And  when  we  follow  this  denial  back  to  its  original  sources, 
we  find  that  it  ends  logically  and  in  fact,  in  a  view  of  the 
world  in  which  the  reality  of  consciousness  in  every  sense 
except  as  an  epi-phenomenon  is  denied.  We  have  our 
choice,  then,  and  here  are  the  real  alternatives  which  lie 
beneath  all  compromise,  between  two  different  and  incon- 
sistent views  of  reality.  Either  the  real  is  a  system  of 
physical  forces,  which  exclude  consciousness  altogether 
from  their  determinations  and  in  which  consciousness  can 
be  at  best  a  helpless  spectator;1  or,  it  is  a  system  in  which 
consciousness  holds  the  primacy,  grounding  the  physical 
itself  which  stands  for  a  form  of  agency  that  is  not  ge- 
nerically  different  from  its  own,  and  reaching  in  its  ethical 
judgments   and   decisions   the   clearest   and   most   definite 

1  Huxley  accepts  the  true  logic  of  this  view  when  he  reduces 
man  to  the  state  of  a  conscious  automaton  in  which  consciousness 
merely  spectates  the  physically  determined  movements  of  the  human 
mechanism. 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  393 

assertion  of  its  causal  efficacy.  We  have  these  alternatives 
before  us  and  a  choice  here  must  be  final,  for  when  con- 
sciousness uses  its  prerogative,  either  to  assert  or  abdicate 
its  own  reality,  there  is  no  higher  court  of  appeal  to  which 
the  case  could  be  taken.  The  ultimate  choice  is  between 
matter  and  consciousness  as  the  final  term  in  reality,  and 
in  casting  in  our  lot  with  either  alternative  we  are  to  under- 
stand that  we  accept  with  the  choice  the  whole  logic  of  the 
situation. 

Let  us,  then,  understand  that  if  we  take  the  material 
alternative,  we  have  planted  our  primary  faith  on  that 
which  we  never  have  known  or  can  know  to  exist.  We 
have  nowhere  any  immediate  touch  of  matter.  And  our 
mediate  knowledge  of  it  is  through  a  symbol  that  does  not 
reveal  inner  nature.  Let  us  understand  further  that  we 
are  asserting  matter  to  be  the  only  real,  in  a  judgment  the 
whole  validity  of  which  depends  on  the  authority  of  con- 
sciousness whose  reality  it  nevertheless  denies.  These  are 
epistemological  considerations.  We  assert  the  agency  of 
natural  causation,  which  embodies  the  principle  of  physical 
efficiency,  as  the  only  real  form  of  agency.  Yet  we  do 
not  anywhere  reach  any  immediate  realization  of  physical 
agency.  We  reach  its  definition  partly  through  abstraction 
from  conscious  agency  and  partly  through  the  analogies 
of  conscious  agency,  and  yet  we  are  led  to  deny  the  reality 
of  the  proto-ty-pe  in  the  interest  of  the  reality  of  the  ec-type. 
But  all  this  inconsistency  has  been  accepted  with  the  alter- 
native. These  and  other  considerations  which  we  need  not 
marshal  here  are  sufficient  to  determine  the  majority  of 
men  who  reflect,  in  favor  of  the  other  alternative.  Aside 
from  other  grounds  of  conviction,  they  will  argue  that 
since  consciousness  must  be  depended  on,  in  the  last  analy- 
sis, to  define  our  concepts  and  criteria  of  the  real,  its  own 
reality  cannot,  except  suicidally,  be  disputed.  If,  then, 
we  are  led  to  adopt  this  alternative  and  to  regard  con- 
sciousness as  primate  in  a  world  of  reality,  we  must  also  be 
prepared  to  accept  the  logic  of  the  situation.     Now  I  am  clear 


394  SYNTHESIS.  part  H. 

to  affirm  that  one  result  of  this  logic  will  be  that  we  are 
here  obliged  to  become  metaphysicians.  This  contingency 
has  been  faced  and  provided  for  all  along  the  line  of  these 
discussions.  But  clearly  it  will  have  to  be  faced  again  in 
connection  with  the  ethical  situation.  For  if  we  examine 
the  claims  of  those  who  seek  to  reduce  ethics  to  a  pure 
science  of  natural  causation,  it  will  be  found  that  the  main 
force  of  their  position  arises  from  the  apparently  greater 
sweep  of  the  causes  they  assign.  There  is  an  obvious 
universality  about  physical  causation,  while  the  agency  of 
consciousness  seems  just  as  obviously  restricted.  Conscious- 
ness apparently  belongs  to  a  corner  of  the  world  and  is  con- 
fined to  a  little  segment  of  time,  while  the  physical  forces 
are  cosmic  in  their  extent.  If  it  were  not  for  this  appearance 
of  universality  on  the  one  hand  and  the  lack  of  it  on  the 
other,  the  claim  would  lose  much  of  its  force.  We  have 
seen  already  in  other  connections  that  if  we  limit  our 
view  of  consciousness  to  that  of  finite  individuals,  it 
will  be  impossible  to  account  for  the  world-movements  as  a 
whole,  since  these  transcend  the  limits  of  finite  foresight 
and  purpose  and  thus  seem  to  be  given  over  to  accident  and 
blind  fate.  The  appeal  has  been  to  a  transcendent  and 
eternal  consciousness  whose  thought  and  purpose  would  be 
adequate  for  the  movement  as  a  whole.  And  here  in  facing 
the  difficulties  of  the  ethical  situation  something  of  the 
same  kind  becomes  necessary.  Intrinsically,  we  cannot 
deny  that  ethical  choice  is  a  vera  causa  without  invalidating 
the  whole  ethical  situation  and  without  taking  a  fatal  step 
toward  the  denial  of  the  reality  of  consciousness  in  the 
world.  But  when  we  attempt  to  equate  the  finite  ethical 
with  the  physical  and  material,  we  are  confronted  with  the 
characteristic  dilemma,  the  threat  of  the  physical  agencies 
by  virtue  of  their  apparently  greater  sweep  and  their  mani- 
fest transcendence  of  the  control  of  the  finite  consciousness, 
not  only  to  encompass  but  also  to  swamp  the  ethical  and 
reduce  it  perforce  to  a  condition  of  dependence  on  the 
physical.     It  is  in  order  to  ground  freedom,  then,   as  a 


chap.  ii.  THE  ETHICAL  SYNTHESIS.  395 

vera  causa  that  there  is  a  demand  here  for  a  metaphysics  of 
ethics,  and  this  metaphysics  will  take  the  form  of  an  appeal 
to  an  eternal  consciousness,  now  in  the  garb  of  a  supreme 
and  all-comprehending  ethical  purpose  in  which  the  ethical 
purposes  of  finite  individuals  shall  be  included  and  con- 
served, and  which  at  the  same  time  shall  supply  the  uni- 
versal under  which  the  world-forces  as  a  whole  may  be 
unified  and  subordinated  to  conscious  direction. 

Now  we  have  only  to  combine  the  two  sets  of  considera- 
tions, developed  from  the  two  vital  ethical  categories, 
obligation  and  freedom,  in  order  to  realize  the  reality  and 
the  strength  of  the  grounds  on  which  a  metaphysics  of 
ethics  rests.  And  we  have  in  conclusion  only  to  complete 
our  synthesis  in  the  ethical  field  in  order  to  be  convinced 
that  it  is  only  when  science  and  metaphysics  combine  their 
forces  that  the  problems  which  the  moral  consciousness  sets 
can  be  solved.  On  the  one  hand,  it  is  only  when  we  recog- 
nize both  the  social  and  the  transcendent  roots  that  a  true 
doctrine  of  obligation  and  duty  can  be  developed.  On  the 
other  hand,  it  is  only  when  the  agency  of  a  transcendent 
will  and  purpose  is  recognized  in  connection  with  the  finite 
agency  of  man,  that  freedom  can  be  maintained  as  a  vera 
causa  and  the  ethical  situation  prevented  from  falling  into 
the  hands  of  purely  physical  forces. 


CHAPTER  III. 

EMOTION  AND  EATIONALITY. 

We  do  not  need  to  preface  this  chapter  with  any  proof  of 
the  fact  that  feeling  and  emotion  are  real  forms  of  con- 
sciousness. If  they  did  not  commend  themselves  as  such 
to  our  immediate  intuition  it  would  be  impossible  to  deduce 
them  by  any  form  of  logical  proof.  Feeling  and  emotion 
are  given  elements  of  consciousness.  But  that  does  not 
preclude  the  possibility  of  their  analysis  and  perhaps  their 
definition.  The  time  has  passed  when  students  of  psy- 
chology were  tempted  to  overlook  the  feeling  elements  in 
consciousness.  It  is  now  the  volitional  that  is  under  fire, 
and  the  attempt  is  being  made  to  reduce  the  consciousness  of 
volitional  effort  to  a  kind  of  fringe  of  sensation  that  accom- 
panies the  motor-adjustments  of  the  physical  organs.  We 
might  ask,  why  not  permit  the  motor-adjustments  to  have 
a  consciousness  inside  of  them,  and  if  not,  why  should  they 
be  found  enjoying  the  luxury  of  a  conscious  fringe  ?  Such 
milliner  ?s  frippery  does  not  seem  to  comport  with  the  dignity 
of  the  real  business  of  experience.  But  we  are  not  holding 
a  brief  for  volition,— at  least  not  in  the  present  stage  of  our 
discussion.  The  case  for  feeling  requires  no  brief,  since  its 
claims  as  a  real  aspect  of  consciousness  have  been  admitted. 
But  the  caption  of  this  chapter  indicates  a  connection  in 
which  the  rights  of  feeling  are  yet  under  discussion.  The 
tendency  to  distinguish  sharply  between  feeling,  and  rea- 
son, and  to  regard  the  latter  as  ultra-emotional,  has  become 

396 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  EATIONALITY.  397 

so  habitual  that  the  proposition  to  incorporate  feeling  in 
the  constitution  of  rationality  represents  a  variation  of  a 
somewhat  startling  character.  But  as  more  than  one  voice 
is  raised  in  favor  of  its  selection,  we  do  not  despair  of  the 
movement  of  accommodation  necessary  to  its  adoption. 

That  the  pleasure-pain  quality  of  consciousness  is 
origin  al  and  under ived  may  be  assumed  without  debate. 
There  can  be  no  deduction  of  feeling.  We  know  pain  and 
pleasure  because  we  have  felt  them,  and  for  no  other  rea- 
son. The  pleasure-pain  reaction  of  consciousness  is  not  to 
be  identified  with  its  cognitive  reaction.  But  then  again, 
it  is  not  to  be  separated  from  it.  What  we  find,  on  analy- 
sis, is  that  cognition  and  feeling  are  very  closely  inter- 
woven in  their  roots,  and  the  question  arises  whether,  in 
the  last  analysis,  cognition  be  ancillary  to  feeling,  or 
whether  the  reverse  relation  be  the  true  one.  It  would  seem 
that  the  answer  to  that  question  depends  on  the  end  which 
the  process  has  in  view.  If  the  process  be  a  cognitive  one, 
it  will  be  found  that  feeling  mediates  it  as  a  primary 
motive.  It  is  in  relation  to  practical  activities  that  cog- 
nition becomes  instrumental  and  feeling  takes  the  initia- 
tive. This  latter  is  an  ordinary  form  of  experience. 
Something  occurs  which  pains  or  pleases  us  directly, 
and  this  experience  supplies  a  motive  to  cognition  which 
develops  a  representation,  defining  the  cause  of  the  expe- 
rience in  some  mental  symbol  that  serves  as  a  guiding 
motive  in  future  action.  This  symbol,  through  its  associa- 
tion with  the  pain-giving  or  pleasure-giving  experience, 
has  the  power  of  arousing  what  we  may  call  the  feeling- 
memory— that  is,  the  recollection  of  the  pleasure-pain  suf- 
fered in  connection  with  the  object— and  this  feeling- 
memory  in  turn  stimulates  a  volition-movement,  the  effort 
to  appropriate  or  repel.  Thus  our  pleasure-pain  experience 
supplies  a  primary  motive  to  cognition  and  also  the  practi- 
cal aim  under  the  stimulus  of  which  the  cognitive  activity 
will  be  led  to  continue  its  symbolizing  and  defining  efforts. 

In    a    chapter    on    The    Aesthetic    Categories    in    my 


398  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

Foundations  of  Knowledge,  it  is  pointed  out  that  the 
secondary  qualities  represent  the  specially  emotional  as- 
pects of  things,  and  the  reason  given  for  this  is  the  fact 
that  the  secondary  qualities  are  more  subjective,  more 
immediately  functions  of  feeling,  than  the  primary,  which 
are  more  objective  and  more  immediately  functions  of  the 
will.  This  will  require  some  further  elaboration  here. 
When  we  say  that  the  secondary  qualities  are  more  sub- 
jective because  more  immediate  functions  of  feeling,  we 
point  to  a  very  important  property  of  feeling  itself ;  name- 
ly, its  subjectivity  or  self -reference.  All  feeling  is  self- 
feeling  acting  under  some  form  of  objective  stimulation. 
After  the  very  first  experience  indeed,  we  may  qualify 
this  statement  and  say  that  all  feeling  is  self-feeling  acting 
under  some  form  of  objective  representation.  More  pro- 
nounced even  than  in  any  other  form  of  psychosis,  do  we 
find  the  tendency  in  the  feeling-psychosis  to  wrap  itself 
up  into  a  self.  But  the  point  here  is  that  this  wrapping- 
process  is  always  connected  with  some  form  of  objective 
representation.  And  the  special  fact  of  interest  is  the 
more  pronounced  or  emotional  character  of  the  secondary 
qualities.  This  will  no  doubt  lead  us  to  the  discovery  that 
the  secondary  qualities  owe  their  greater  emotional  char- 
acter to  the  fact  that  they  appeal  directly  to  feeling,  while 
the  primary  qualities;  bulk,  extension,  etc.,  appeal  only 
indirectly  through  the  will.  The  primary  qualities,  as  we 
have  maintained  in  earlier  chapters  of  this  book,  are  di- 
rectly related  to  the  will  as  symbols  of  that  which  rebuffs 
or  satisfies  its  own  energy,  and  through  the  will,  only  indi- 
rectly to  feeling.  The  secondary  qualities,  on  the  con- 
trary, have  an  emotional  quality  in  themselves.  They  are 
pleasant  or  painful  to  the  sight,  hearing,  taste,  touch  or 
smell,  and  thus  carry  with  them  an  original  appeal  to  feel- 
ing made  by  a  first  stimulation.  Now  feeling  stimulates 
self-consciousness  more  directly  than  any  other  form  of 
mental  activity.  The  tendency  of  consciousness  to  become 
self-conscious   only   becomes    fully   active   in   response   to 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  EATIONALITY.  399 

objective  stimulations  of  feeling  and  especially  in  response 
to  the  stimulations  of  the  secondary  qualities  of  objects. 

We  come,  then,  to  a  more  special  examination  of  the 
emotion-psychosis  as  a  preliminary  to  the  problem  of  its 
relation  to  the  principle  of  rationality.  We  have  spoken 
of  the  feeling-reaction  as  if  it  always  continued  to  be 
a  simple  reaction  of  pleasure  or  pain.  But  this  has  been 
proved  not  to  be  the  case.  Pleasure-pain  is  no  doubt  at 
first  a  simple  experience,  but  what  we  call  emotion  is  com- 
plex. The  pleasure  or  pain  we  experience  from  the 
secondary  qualities  of  things  is  mediated,  it  is  true,  by 
cognition;  we  must  perceive  the  quality.  But  it  is  the 
immediate  presence  of  the  quality  that  gives  the  pleasure- 
pain  experience.  Hence  there  is  little  complexity  here. 
But  in  the  case  of  emotion  proper,  a  very  important  ele- 
ment in  what  we  may  call  the  emotion-complex,  is  the  idea. 
This  idea  may  be  a  cognition,  in  which  case  its  power  Avill 
be  due  to  associated  elements.  But  it  is  generally  a  repre- 
sentation or  thought  in  which  some  situation  is  conceived 
that  is  adapted  to  calling  forth  a  variety  of  feelings,  per- 
haps of  various  kinds.  Thus  the  special  emotion  we  are 
experiencing  may  be  that  of  homesickness,  and  the  idea 
that  calls  it  forth  may  be  the  representation  of  some  situa- 
tion in  which  the  home  life  will  be  vividly  brought  before 
our  imagination.  Now  this  representation  in  the  different 
details  of  it  will  no  doubt  arouse,  to  some  extent  at  least, 
a  variety  of  simple  feelings,  but  none  of  these  will  be  the 
emotion  proper.  Nor  will  it,  as  a  rule,  be  any  blending  of 
these  elements.  The  emotion  of  homesickness  will  be  our 
personal  reaction  as  a  whole  upon  the  situation  thus  pre- 
sented. An  emotion  proper  is  never  a  simple  feeling  of 
pleasure-pain.  It  is  never  a  complex  of  simple  feelings  of 
pleasure-pain.  It  is  the  result  of  a  feeling-reaction  of  the 
whole  self  which  is  present  in  the  experience,  upon  a  situa- 
tion the  elements  of  which  have  the  power  of  calling  forth 
various    simple    feelings.      I    do    not    know    whether    the 


400  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

psychologists  of  feeling  have  sufficiently  noted  this,  but  it 
seems  to  me  to  be  a  fact  of  major  importance. 

Our  analysis  of  an  emotion  has  resolved  it  into  a  feel- 
ing-idea that  calls  forth  a  feeling-reaction  of  the  self  as  a 
whole.  And  it  is  to  this  character  of  the  emotion,  the  fact 
that  it  is  a  reaction  of  the  self  as  a  whole  upon  some  feeling- 
idea,  that  it  owes  not  only  its  peculiar  relation  to  self -con- 
sciousness but  also  its  value,  as  we  shall  see  later,  for  ob- 
jective knowledge.  The  bearing  of  emotion  on  self-con- 
sciousness follows  as  an  immediate  deduction  from  its 
nature.  The  self-reaction  as  a  whole  will  be  a  reaction  in 
which  the  whole  load  of  the  objective  will  be  thrown  back 
into  consciousness  at  once.  The  present  self  is  forced  by 
the  situation  to  live  the  whole  experience  over  again,  and 
there  it  stands  objectified  before  it.  Necessarily  the  reaction 
will  be  that  of  remembered  joys  and  sorrows,  mingled  with 
the  sense  of  present  deprivation,  and  these  elements  will 
lead  in  turn  to  our  projecting  the  whole  into  the  future 
as  an  object  of  longing.  Thus  the  feeling  of  homesickness 
arises  as  a  mingling  of  anticipated  joy  in  the  future  with 
a  sense  of  present  pain  and  deprivation.  Let  us  then 
define  an  emotion  as  a  self-reaction  as  a  ivhole  upon  a 
complex  situation,  either  pleasant  or  painful.  This  will 
sufficiently  distinguish  it,  on  the  one  hand,  from  a  simple 
feeling,  and  on  the  other,  will  enable  us  to  develop  its  con- 
nection with  a  rational  doctrine  of  the  world.  We  have 
made  it  sufficiently  clear,  I  think,  that  the  emotion-psy- 
chosis is  not  simple  but  very  complex,  involving  not  only  a 
variety  of  simple  feelings,  but  also  a  complex  mental  rep- 
resentation. The  idea,  as  we  may  call  the  mental  element, 
is  the  eye  of  the  emotion.  It  is  that  which  reveals  to  con- 
sciousness the  interesting  situation,  the  self-reaction  upon 
which  constitutes  the  emotion.  But  the  emotion-psychosis 
is  also  related  to  volition.  We  have  seen  how  simple  inter- 
est-feeling supplies  the  motive  of  volitional  activity.  Now 
emotion  is  similarly  related  to  the  volitional  activities,  but 
not  so  simply.     The  emotion  is  a  self-reaction  upon  the 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  RATIONALITY.  4Q1 

idea  of  a  complex  situation  as  a  whole.  This  in  turn 
stimulates  the  will,  but  complexly  rather  than  simply. 
What  is  the  aspect  of  my  emotion  that  gives  it  the  power  to 
stimulate  volition?  We  saw  that  the  emotion  was  a  self- 
reaction  and  that  it  reacted  upon  a  situation  which  at 
the  same  time  embodied  for  it  a  desirable  ideal  and  brought 
painfully  into  consciousness  the  sense  of  its  present  dep- 
rivation. The  self  of  the  emotion  is,  therefore,  a  self 
whose  consciousness  is  synthetic,  including  a  sense  of  the 
pained,  deprived  self  of  the  present,  along  with  a  sense  of 
the  satisfied  self  of  the  ideal.  And  the  emotion  itself  is 
simply  the  movement  of  the  self  as  a  whole,  away  from  the 
pained  and  deprived  self  of  the  present  toward  the  satisfied 
self  of  the  ideal.  The  self  thus  emotionally  identifies  itself 
with  the  self  of  the  ideal  in  which  it  is  to  find  its  satis- 
faction. Now,  such  a  motive  stimulates  the  will  by  supply- 
ing it  with  an  ideal  of  self-completeness  standing  in 
conscious  contrast  with  the  imperfect  and  unsatisfied  self 
of  the  present.  The  volitional  activity  which  arises  in  conse- 
quence will  be  a  movement  from  an  unsatisfactory  present  to 
a  satisfying  ideal  both  terms  of  which  are  in  consciousness. 
We  have  here  every  element  of  a  reflective  situation  pre- 
sented, and  it  is  clear  that  in  emotion  we  have  come  upon 
the  form  of  reflective  feeling.  Going  back  in  our  analysis 
with  this  added  insight,  it  will  be  found  that  the  distinction 
between  spontaneous  and  reflective  feeling  will  arise  exactly 
at  this  point  and  that  emotion  will  always  stand  for  a 
reflected  form  of  feeling. 

Moreover,  the  result  that  we  have  here  attained  is  of 
great  value,  not  only  as  enabling  us  to  fix  more  clearly  the 
status  of  emotion,  but  also  as  aiding  us  in  determining  the 
fundamental  categories  of  the  emotional  consciousness. 
These  we  have  determined,  in  the  chapter  on  The  Aesthetic 
Categories,  in  Foundations  of  Knowledge,  in  an  argu- 
ment that  is  not  repeated  here,  as  individuality  and  unity. 
Substituting  the  term  personality  as  representing  the  dis- 
tinctively emotional  aspect  of  individuality  for  individ- 
26 


402  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

uality  itself,  we  have  as  the  fundamental  categories  of  the 
emotional  consciousness,  personality  and  unity.  Now  the 
analysis  of  the  present  chapter  will  shed  some  further  light 
on  the  rationale  of  this  result.  Emotion  is  a  reflective  form 
of  feeling  and  arises  as  a  self-reaction  upon  a  complex 
situation  that  presents  as  one  of  its  features  a  gap  between 
the  actual  and  the  ideal.  It  would  not  be  possible  to  con- 
ceive circumstances  more  favorable  for  the  development  of 
a  personal  reaction,  that  is,  for  the  development  of  a  reac- 
tion which  would  be  characteristic  of  the  self  as  a  whole. 
In  every  such  reaction  the  self  is  coming  to  itself  in  a 
characteristic  attitude  and  is  making  a  characteristic 
objective  exhibition  of  itself  also.  The  personality  of  con- 
sciousness thus  expresses  itself  more  pronouncedly  in  emo- 
tion than  in  any  other  type  of  experience.  But  we  said 
also  that  the  foregoing  exposition  sheds  light  on  the  cate- 
gory of  unity.  We  have  shown  how  the  emotion  arises  as  a 
reaction  upon  a  contrast  which  appears  between  a  present 
experience  and  the  representation  of  a  past  experience 
which  in  this  instance  is  transported  as  a  whole  to  the 
future  and  idealized.  It  is  not  necessary  in  all  cases,  how- 
ever, that  this  bodily  transference  from  past  to  future 
should  take  place.  It  is  only  necessary  that  experience 
should  supply  the  elements  to  the  imagination  in  order  that 
the  synthesis  of  the  ideal  may  be  completed.  The  points 
of  importance  are  that  the  synthesis  is  effected  and  the 
idealization  takes  place  and  that  this  idealization  is  not  so 
much  the  product  of  the  intellect  as  of  the  imagination 
acting  under  lively  emotional  stimulus.  Now,  objectively 
considered,  the  process  is  not  so  much  one  of  ideal  self- 
realization  as  it  is  a  unification  of  experience.  Objectively 
there  is  a  breach  between  the  actual  and  the  ideal  and  the 
unity  is  restored  in  the  healing  of  this  breach.  The  emo- 
tional demand  stimulating  the  imagination  leads  to  the 
representation  of  an  ideal  unity,  in  the  sense  of  the  whole- 
ness and  completeness  of  which,  full  satisfaction  is  found. 
How,  then,  do  these  categories  of  personality  and  unity 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  RATIONALITY.  403 

become  incorporated  into  the  constitution  of  the  principle 
of  rationality,  or,  as  it  has  been  called  historically,  suf- 
ficient reason?  In  the  chapter  above  cited  on  the  Aes- 
thetic Categories,1  we  have  gone  into  details  in  order  to 
show  how  the  emotional  demand  for  unification  incor- 
porates itself  with  the  presentational  and  dynamic  cate- 
gories leading  to  an  ideal  completion  of  the  world  under 
each  of  these  categories.  Simply  stating  results,  we  may 
say  that  the  aesthetic  requirement  leads,  as  we  pointed  out. 
to  a  threefold  application  of  the  principle  of  unity  in  the 
spheres  of  the  mathematical,  the  physico-dynamic  and  the 
aesthetic,  consciousness.  The  point  of  vital  interest  in  this 
connection  is  the  fact  that  the  emotional  demand  acquires 
epistemological  value  when  it  coalesces  with  the  categories 
of  knowledge,  inasmuch  as  it  is  only  under  the  emotional 
stimulus  that  the  scientific  ideals  of  knowledge  are  de- 
veloped to  completeness.  Now  in  any  field  of  knowledge, 
the  structural  categories  represent  the  standards  of  ration- 
ality in  that  field.  In  the  world  of  cause  and  effect  the 
principle  of  causation  will  formulate  the  law  of  reason,  and 
when  this  principle  is  conceived  ideally,  as  it  will  be  under 
the  stimulus  of  the  emotional  demand  for  unity,  it  will 
formulate  the  law  of  sufficient  reason.  What  is  true  of 
cause  holds  also  of  any  other  structural  principle  of  knowl- 
edge. And  this  unity-demand,  which  coalesces,  as  we  have 
seen,  with  each  category  in  order  to  unify  the  content  of 
experience  in  its  special  fields,  will  also  express  itself  in  a 
general  demand  which  will  take  the  form  of  a  reaction  upon 
the  content  of  experience  as  a  whole.  Or,  if  we  define 
reality  as  the  realized  content  of  experience,  it  may  then  be 
said  that  this  unity-demand  arises  as  a  reaction  upon  the 
world  of  reality  as  a  whole.  This  will  be  the  final  form 
which  the  requirement  of  unity  will  take,  and  inasmuch  as 
its  partial  embodiments  constitute  the  highest  principles 
of  rationality  in  the  several  spheres  of  its  application,  we 

1  Foundations  of  Knowledge.     Chap.  IX,  Part  II. 


404  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

find  here  that  its  reaction  on  the  whole  of  reality  embodies 
itself  in  the  principle  of  the  highest  rationality. 

We  have  concluded  that  the  principle  of  rationality 
arises  out  of  a  synthesis  of  thought  and  emotion,  and  here 
we  undertake  to  exhibit  something  of  the  method  of  this 
synthesis.  It  has  already  been  pointed  out  in  the  Founda- 
tions of  Knowledge,  but  will  be  restated  here,  that  the 
final  test  of  representation  or  feeling  is  congruity.  If  the 
representation  or  thought  be  congruous  with  the  represen- 
tation-complex that  constitutes  the  body  of  formed  ex- 
perience, it  will  then  be  accepted  as  true  and  assimilated 
into  the  body  of  formed  knowledge.  Moreover,  if  the  new 
feeling  or  emotion  be  congruous  with  the  emotion-complex 
that  constitutes  the  formed  body  of  emotional  experience, 
then  it  will  be  accepted  and  assimilated.  In  both  cases 
congruity  is  the  test  of  acceptance,  and  that  congruity 
expresses  itself  either  in  the  satisfaction  of  the  logical 
demand  for  agreement  among  the  parts  of  the  representa- 
tion-complex, or  in  the  satisfaction  of  the  feeling-demand 
that  there  shall  be  harmony  among  the  elements  of  the 
emotion-complex.  The  intellectual  congruity  thus  consists  in 
that  form  of  agreement  which  arises  out  of  the  comparison 
of  representations  or  ideas,  while  the  emotional  congruity 
is  found  to  consist  in  that  feeling  of  satisfaction  which  arises 
out  of  the  comparison  of  elements  of  emotion.  The  two 
congruities  lead  to  what  we  may  call  agreement  and  har- 
mony, respectively.  And  the  question  here  is  whether  these 
two  congruities  are  to  be  regarded  as  entirely  distinct  stand- 
ards of  the  real,  or  rather,  as  standards  which,  however 
much  they  may  actually  diverge,  and  even  in  appearance  at 
least,  become  hostile,  yet  tend  to  coalesce  in  some  point  of 
ideal  synthesis.  We  have  taken  the  affirmative  in  Founda- 
tions of  Knowledge,  but  assume  the  privilege  of  rearguing 
the  case  briefly  at  this  point.  The  fact  that  it  is  the  same 
consciousness  that  makes  both  demands,  creates  a  presump- 
tion at  the  outset,  in  favor  of  their  final  unity.  But  setting 
this  presumption  aside  for  the  present,  we  find  that  the 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  EATIONALITY.  4Q5 

experience,  so  long  as  it  remains  concrete,  includes  both 
intellectual  and  emotional  elements.  These  may  be  sepa- 
rated by  abstraction,  however,  so  that  we  are  able  to  speak 
intelligently  of  the  cognitive  and  emotional  elements  and 
processes  of  our  experience.  Again,  the  experience  that 
arises  within  consciousness  may  be  distinguishable  as  intel- 
lectual or  emotional.  But  it  will  be  found  that  our  thoughts 
arise  customarily  out  of  some  medium  of  feeling  in  which 
they  have  been  acquiring  warmth,  while  our  emotions 
on  the  other  hand  have  arisen  out  of  the  cold  bath  of  the 
intellectual  medium.  There  is  no  such  thing  as  thought 
purged  of  emotion,  or  feeling  purged  completely  of  intel- 
lectual elements.  The  truer  representation  of  conscious- 
ness is  one,  I  feel  sure,  in  which  every  psychosis  is  conceived 
to  be  a  complex  of  elements,— feeling  involving  idea  and 
representation,  while  thought  involves  feeling  or  emotion, 
the  difference  arising  from  the  fact  that  in  the  thought- 
psychosis,  feeling  is  subordinated  to  the  interest  of  thought 
itself,  whereas  in  the  feeling-psychosis,  thought  is  tributary 
to  the  interest  of  feeling.  In  the  concrete  there  is  none  of 
that  separateness  which  we  achieve  in  our  abstractions. 

Moreover,  when  we  consider  the  real  situation,  we  find 
that  it  is  the  same  world  of  content  that  calls  forth  both 
reactions.  The  botanizer  may  be  temporarily  oblivious  to 
the  emotional  proprieties  when  a  strange  flower  confronts 
him  on  his  mother's  grave,  but  it  will  be  because  the  sys- 
tem of  thought-relations  which  his  trained  intellect  is  able 
to  trace  in  the  flower  has  aroused  an  emotional  reaction 
that  is  strong  enough  to  temporarily  suppress  memory  and 
association.  Here  we  have  a  system  of  intellectual  rela- 
tions becoming  an  emotional  object  in  the  most  direct  sense. 
Again,  it  is  possible  for  the  artist  in  presence  of  the  emo- 
tional object,  say  the  "flower  in  the  crannied  wall"  which 
Tennyson  immortalizes,  to  become  so  impressed  with  the 
thought  or  thoughts  which  it  symbolizes  as  to  give  these  an 
emotional  expression  in  some  other  form  of  art.  The  poet 
thus  finds  the  thoughts  suggested  by  the  little  flower  an 


406  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

emotional  object  that  clothes  itself  in  the  emotional  vest- 
ments of  beautiful  verse.  Moreover,  the  mathematician, 
the  least  emotional  of  men,  qua  mathematician,  will  find  his 
symbols  becoming  emotional  objects  in  his  hands,  not  solely 
by  virtue  of  some  extra-mathematical  suggestiveness,  but 
because  of  the  harmony  of  relations  and  the  ideal  of  unity 
to  which  they  directly  lead.  Thus  again  the  thought 
becomes  a  direct  emotional  object.  Pure  music,  on  the 
other  hand,  rests  on  a  system  of  intellectual  relations  which 
when  brought  out  by  the  physical  expert  have  power 
to  inspire  emotion  of  a  very  marked  intensity  altogether 
apart  from  their  musical  associations. 

The  conclusion  to  which  these  illustrations  point  is 
strengthened  by  the  fact  that  congruity  is  everywhere  an 
emotional  object.  The  fact  that  diverse  elements  are  fitting 
together,  no  matter  whether  the  elements  so  fitted  be  the 
parts  of  a  machine,  the  members  of  an  intellectual  system, 
or  the  elements  of  an  emotion-complex,  gives  rise  in  all 
cases  to  an  emotional  object.  The  other  side  of  the  case 
we  are  arguing  here  is  that  this  congruity  is  everywhere 
an  object  that  satisfies  the  intellectual  interest.  If  con- 
gruity as  such  makes  a  direct  appeal  to  the  emotions,  its 
appeal  to  the  intellect  is  just  as  direct,  and  while  the  intel- 
lectual interest  is  satisfied  only  with  the  agreement  of 
representations  in  a  thought-complex,  and  the  emotional 
interest  only  with  the  harmony  of  elements  in  an  emotion- 
complex, — while,  I  say,  this  is  true,  it  will  be  found  that  in 
the  harmony  of  the  emotion-complex  the  satisfaction  of  the 
idea  is  implicated,  while  the  satisfaction  of  feeling  is 
involved  in  that  which  meets  the  requirement  of  the 
intellect. 

The  above  results  are  directly  in  line  with  the  conclu- 
sions toward  which  we  are  tending,  namely,  that  in  the 
notion  of  unity  the  two  congruities  blend  and  unity  becomes 
at  the  same  time  an  intellectual  and  an  emotional  object, 
and,  in  fact,  is  the  one  notion  in  which  the  intellectual  and 
the  emotional  are  ideally  realized.    We  do  not  find  ourselves 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  RATIONALITY.  407 

able  to  determine  whether  unity  be  more  true  or  more 
beautiful,  more  satisfactory  to  the  intellect  or  to  the  feel- 
ing, the  fact  being  that  it  is  the  ideal  requirement  of  both 
truth  and  beauty.  Let  us  now  assume  that  the  proof  of  the 
final  synthesis  of  thought  and  emotion  in  the  category  of 
unity  has  been  completed,  and  let  us  turn  to  the  other  side 
of  the  emotional  situation.  We  found  this  in  the  category 
of  personality.  For  while  feeling  tends  to  unity  of  content 
in  experience,  it  also  tends  toward  individuality  of  self- 
expression  and  culminates  as  we  have  seen  in  personality. 
Now  it  is  in  this  category  of  personality  that  we  find  the 
complement  to  the  universalizing  quality  of  the  notion  of 
unity.  The  notion  of  unity,  in  the  abstract  at  least,  is 
that  of  the  falling  together  of  parts  and  the  Aufhebung 
of  pluralities  and  distinctions.  We  have  seen,  however, 
that,  intellectually,  these  distinctions  must  receive  recogni- 
tion. The  world  is  a  plurality  of  existents,  and,  taking  the 
standpoint  of  the  primacy  of  consciousness  in  the  world, 
these  existents  are  translated  into  the  terms  of  conscious, 
or  at  least  psychicj  individuals.  The  type  of  individuality 
itself  is  found  in  self -consciousness  and  particularly  in  that 
form  of  it  which  is  involved  in  the  central  agency  of  volition. 
Were  we  to  be  asked  where  the  principle  of  individuation 
is  to  be  found,  we  should  answer,  in  the  same  place  where 
we  go  to  look  for  the  type  of  individuality  itself.  If  the 
type  of  individuality  can  be  found  only  in  self-conscious- 
ness, then  its  principle  will  be  to  seek  in  the  central  move- 
ment which  self -consciousness  reveals.  This  is  the  movement 
of  self-determining  volition.  It  is  the  type  of  individual- 
ization everywhere,  and  whether  our  problem  be  that  of 
determining  the  individuality  of  lower  forms  of  existence, 
or  the  distinctively  metaphysical  problem  of  the  ultimate 
spring  of  individuality  in  the  world  of  reality  as  a  whole, 
we  must  revert  to  this  type  as  a  point  of  departure. 

Let  us  say,  then,  that  the  form  of  individuality,  so  far 
forth  as  it  defines  itself  to  thought  apart  from  distinctive 
emotional  influence,  is  that  of  self-determining  volitional 


408  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

activity  (which  we  have  seen  to  involve  the  idea  as  one  of 
its  elements)  ;  we  may  then  ask  what  is  the  corresponding 
individuality  in  the  field  of  the  emotions,  and  our  answer 
is,  personality.  We  are  not  concerned  here  to  carry  the 
analysis  of  personality  further  than  we  have  already  car- 
ried it  in  another  connection,1  except  at  one  point  which  is 
of  essential  interest  here.  We  have  shown  in  the  general 
doctrine  of  personality  that  it  lies  in  the  sphere  of  plurality 
and  variation  in  the  conscious  life  of  the  individual;  that, 
given  the  individual  existent,  endowed  with  consciousness, 
it  is  possible  for  it  to  embody  itself  in  a  variety  of  forms, 
more  or  less  persistent,  of  conscious  reaction  as  a  whole. 
These  conscious  reactions  as  a  whole  are  what  we  call 
personal  reactions  and  their  types  are  determined  by  the 
threefold  nature  of  the  fundamental  psychoses  which  may 
be  in  form  intellectual,  volitional  or  emotional  But  the 
variations  within  these  types  have  an  indefinite  range. 
Also  the  possibility  exists  of  co-existent  or  alternating 
personalities  in  the  same  individual  existent.  Then  there 
is  the  debatable  field  of  possession  which  involves  the  possi- 
bility of  one  personal  existent  entering  bodily  into  another 
and  taking  temporary  charge  of  its  housekeeping.  Per- 
sonality is  thus  a  specializing  function  of  emotion  by 
virtue  of  which  it  introduces  the  warmth  and  interest  of 
variety  and  contrast,  of  specific  reference  and  immediate 
touch,  into  experience.  But  personality  is  not  an  unlimited 
or  unqualified  principle  of  variation  and  contrast.  It  is 
limited  on  the  side  of  conscious  individuality;  it  must  be 
an  expression  of  the  conscious  existent  as  a  whole.  In 
other  words,  a  whole  self  must  embody  itself  in  this  per- 
sonal form.  The  variations  of  personality  are  not  abso- 
lutely unchecked,  therefore,  and  do  not  go  so  far  as  to 
disrupt  individuality  itself.  There  can  be  no  person  where 
there  is  no  self,  and  wherever  there  is  a  self  there  is  an 
individual  existent. 

1  See  Foundations  of  Knowledge .    Part  II,  Chap.  II.   Categeories 
of  the  Subject  Consciousness. 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  KATIONALITY.  409 

We  may  take  it,  then,  that  personality  is  the  individ- 
uality of  thought  and  will,  qualified  emotionally,  so  that 
it  is  able  to  fit  better  into  the  sinuosities  of  a  variant 
experience.  Personality,  or  rather  the  process  of  personali- 
zation, will  express  for  us  the  principle  of  individuation 
when  it  has  been  emotionally  qualified.  We  are  ready 
now,  having  determined  the  presence  of  the  synthesis  of 
thought  and  feeling  in  the  principles,  alike  of  individuation 
and  unification,  to  proceed  to  the  determination  of  the  form 
of  the  principle  of  rationality.  Let  it  be  understood  that 
we  do  not  regard  anything  as  completely  rational  that  does 
not  satisfy  our  whole  conscious  nature.  If  it  satisfies  the 
intellect  but  leaves  the  emotional  world  in  chaos,  it  does  not 
embody  a  completely  rational  situation.  How,  then,  shall 
we  state  a  principle  of  rationality  that  shall  be  adequate  to 
every  legitimate  demand?  It  seems  that  there  is  no  other 
way  open  than  to  seek  a  principle  that  will  satisfy  the  intel- 
lectual and  emotional  demands  of  both  personality  and 
unity.  Now  such  a  principle  must  be  derived  from  some 
such  analysis  of  personality  and  unity  as  we  have  given 
here.  We  must  reach  a  concept  of  unity  that  will  conserve 
both  the  intellectual  and  the  emotional  congruities,  and  we 
must  reach  a  notion  of  personality  that  will  conserve  the 
oneness  of  individuality  and  the  variations  of  real  expe- 
rience. Having  achieved  these,  we  shall  further  recognize 
the  fact  that  our  principle  of  rationality  must  include  a 
synthesis  of  the  requirements  of  both  personality  and 
unity.  We  then  reach  the  following  statement:  A  com- 
pletely rational  conception  of  Reality  is  one  in  which  the 
combined  requirements  of  thought  and  feeling  are  ideally 
met  by  a  principle  of  unity  that  has  its  spring  and  type  in 
the  oneness  of  conscious  individuality ,  uniting  with  a  prin- 
ciple of  individuation  that  includes  while  it  grounds  and 
limits  the  variations  of  personality. 

Taking  this  as  the  statement  of  the  principle  of  complete 
rationality,  the  mode  in  which  it  will  apply  as  an  ultimate 
criterion  and  test  is  obvious.     What  we  are  seeking  in  any 


410  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

field  of  experience  is  some  criterion  that  will  help  us  to 
determine  what  kind  of  a  result  may  be  taken  as  ultimate 
in  this  field.  Thus  in  the  field  and  limits  of  natural  science 
where  natural  causation  is  the  principle  of  explanation,  a 
result  could  be  regarded  as  ultimately  satisfactory  that 
would  fit  into  a  system  which  had  been  completely  unified 
under  its  principle.  If  there  were  any  province  of  natural 
happenings  that  had  not  as  yet  been  brought  under  the  law 
of  causation,  the  situation  would  be  regarded  as  so  far 
irrational.  Again,  no  situation  in  this  field  could  be  re- 
garded as  completely  rational  that  did  not  involve  the 
connection  of  its  phenomena  with  underlying  grounds  or 
substances.  Of  course  phenomenalism  denies  this,  but 
from  the  standpoint  of  these  discussions  phenomenalism  is 
not  completely  rational.  Or,  taking  our  illustration  from 
the  metaphysical  region,  when  we  have  taken  the  teleolog- 
ical  principle  of  purposive  action  as  the  vera  causa  that  is 
to  explain  results,  the  mere  finite  activity  of  that  principle 
will  never  be  able  to  completely  satisfy  the  demands  of 
rationality,  inasmuch  as  it  will  always  leave  the  world- 
movements  as  a  whole  to  accident  or  blind  fate.  The  re- 
quirement of  rationality  here  is  a  principle  that  will  include 
and  organize  the  whole.  Nor,  again,  would  a  principle  be 
completely  rational  that  should  attempt  to  divorce  unity 
from  individuality,  for  we  have  seen  that  the  unity  of 
individuality  is  the  type  and  model  of  all  unity  and  that 
the  world  of  unity  must  also  be  a  world  of  individual 
existents.  Pantheism  would  deny  this,  but  from  the  stand- 
point of  these  discussions  pantheism  is  not  completely 
rational. 

The  conclusions  we  have  here  reached  are  conformable 
to  some  of  the  most  characteristic  results  of  genetic  psy- 
chology. If  we  take  the  view  of  feeling  and  emotion 
presented  by  genetic  psychology  in  its  analysis  of  the 
emotional  life,  we  find  that  not  only  have  the  feelings 
a  history  corresponding  in  its  broad  outlines  with  that  of 
the   intellect,   but  that  feeling  has  played  an  important 


chap.  in.  EMOTION  AND  EATIONALITY.  4H 

part  in  making  that  history.  Taking  the  two  categories, 
habit  and  accommodation,  between  which  the  genetic  his- 
tory is  distributed,  the  well-known  conservativeness  of 
feeling  would  possibly  lead  us  to  assign  it  mainly  to  the 
category  of  habit.  It  is  probably  true  that  feeling  has 
more  to  do  with  stability  than  with  progress.  But  the 
psychologists  have  shown  that  feeling  is  also  a  factor 
in  progress.  There  is  a  circular  movement  involved  in 
accommodation  that  carries  feeling  as  well  as  intellect  with 
it,  and  more  than  this,  there  is  a  boiling  up  of  feeling  which 
causes  it  often  to  overflow  its  banks  and  thus  contribute 
directly  to  variation.  AVe  have  feeling  here  directly  stimu- 
lating thought  and  leading  to  steps  in  progress.  Now 
psychology  has  shown  how,  through  the  dialectic  of  habit 
and  accommodation,  the  mental  life  as  a  whole  advances. 
It  has  been  made  clear  in  this  connection  how  the  cri- 
terion of  selection  takes  the  form  of  an  ideal  situation 
that  appeals  to  emotion  through  thought  and  thus  brings 
progress  into  direct  relation  with  the  emotion.  The  whole 
ideal  of  psychic  progress,— that  which  determines  selection 
and  the  goal  and  direction  of  advance,— is  thus  one  that  is 
qualified  by  emotion.  Again,  one  of  the  most  important 
chapters  in  modern  psychology  is  that  in  which  we  have  a 
detailed  demonstration  of  the  fact  that  the  whole  genetic 
history  on  its  subjective  side  is  one  of  the  evolution  of  the 
individual  self.  And  we  have  here  an  exhibition  of  the 
fact  that  in  the  evolution  of  selfhood  feeling  plays  a  co- 
ordinate part  with  thought.  For  the  process  by  which  the 
conscious  individual  becomes  a  socius  and  enters  into  the 
life  of  the  community  is  one  that  is  mediated  from  the 
beginning  by  what  may  be  called  an  emotional  copy. 
There  is  thought,  of  course,  but  the  copy  is  more  than 
thought.  It  is  thought  qualified  by  feeling  and  stimulated 
by  feeling.  The  very  essence  of  sociality  is,  therefore,  more 
emotional  than  intellectual,  taking  the  form  of  sympathy 
and  its  opposite.  But  the  lesson  we  wish  to  extract  here 
is  that  in  the  representation  of  modern  psychology  sociality 


412 


SYNTHESIS. 


PART  II. 


begins  with  an  emotion-stirring  copy  of  its  other,  while  in 
the  determination  of  its  goal  it  reaches  the  concept  of  a 
community,  the  life  and  unity  of  which  is  due  to  the 
individuality  pulsating  at  its  heart. 


CHAPTER  IV. 


EELIGION. 


One  of  the  important  results  of  the  sociological  discussions 
was  the  conclusion  there  reached  that  the  individual  is 
something  more  than  the  social  organism;  that  he  is  the 
bearer  of  interests  and  demands  which  the  social  organism 
is  not  adequate  to  satisfy.  These  interests  and  demands 
may  be  designated  as  ultra-social,  and  the  questions,  what 
their  ground  in  consciousness  may  be  and  what  further 
stages  in  the  construction  of  the  real  they  lead  to,  will  be 
the  topics  of  the  chapters  that  follow.  If  we  ask  for  proof 
that  man  is  more  than  a  merely  social  being  and  that  his 
nature  contains  ultra-social  roots,  this  proof  can  be  found 
in  its  most  unmistakable  form  in  his  religious  experience. 
Now,  in  speaking  of  religion  as  ultra-social,  we  do  not 
mean  to  imply  that  it  is  not  vitally  related  to  and  rooted 
in  the  social  nature  of  man.  We  hold,  on  the  contrary,  that 
religion  has  social  as  well  as  ultra-social  roots ;  and  it  is  only 
in  respect  of  its  most  characteristic  feature  that  it  tran- 
scends the  limits  of  experiences  that  are  purely  social. 
Man  must  already  have  become  a  socius,  in  some  sense,  and 
responsive  to  the  motives  of  sociality  before  he  is  in  a 
position  to  be  genuinely  religious.  "If  ye  love  not  your 
brother  whom  ye  have  seen,  how  shall  ye  love  God  whom 
ye  have  not  seen?" 

On  the  other  hand  the  fact  that  the  developed  religious 
consciousness   involves   the   feeling   or   idea  of  an   object 

413 


414  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

which,  though  in  some  vital  respects  like  ourselves,  is  yet 
in  important  regards  also  transcendent,  and  not  to  be  com- 
pletely subsumed  under  our  social  categories,  is  one  that  is 
not  open  to  serious  debate.  The  vital  point  regarding  the 
religious  consciousness  is  whether  this  feeling  or  idea  of  the 
transcendence  of  the  object  of  religion  has  original  grounds 
in  man's  nature,  or,  on  the  contrary,  is  to  be  regarded  as  a 
pure  product  of  development.  We  have  in  mind  here 
those  theories  of  the  rise  of  religion  which  seek  its  original 
springs  in  the  primitive  man's  experiences  of  ghostly 
apparitions  or  in  the  visions  of  dead  ancestors  and  other 
phenomena  that  are  reducible  to  purely  humanistic  terms. 
We  are  not  disposed  to  deny  that  such  experiences  are 
calculated  to  stimulate  the  religious  nature  and  may  thus 
represent  forces  in  the  evolution  of  the  religious  conscious- 
ness. But  it  is  pertinent  to  ask  regarding  such  methods 
of  explanation,  whether  the  causes  they  point  to  would  ever 
be  sufficient  of  themselves  to  produce  a  religious  sense  in  a 
consciousness  that  by  hypothesis  does  not  already  possess 
the  norm  of  religiousness.  In  order  to  deal  with  such  a 
question  intelligently,  it  is  important  that  we  should  dis- 
tinguish between  those  conditions  of  any  kind  of  ex- 
perience which  taken  together  constitute  its  potentiality, 
and  those  more  external  conditions  that  merely  stimulate 
its  development.  It  is  easy  enough  to  see  how  the  causes 
to  which  these  theories  call  attention  might  serve  as 
important  and  perhaps  as  indispensable  conditions  of  the 
development  of  the  religious  consciousness,  provided  an 
original  germ  of  religiousness  be  presupposed  that  could  be 
stimulated  and  nourished  by  such  food.  If  this  original 
possession  be  denied,  however,  it  is  difficult  to  see,  for 
example,  how  a  dream  about  a  dead  ancestor  should  have 
any  more  effect  in  developing  religion  than  a  dream  about 
the  living.  Why  should  the  image  of  a  human  personage 
in  a  dream  lead  to  inferences  of  the  superhuman?  If  the 
dream  itself  contained  the  vision  of  something  superhuman, 
or  supernatural,  then  the  tendency  of  the  primitive  man  to 


chap.  iv.  EELIGION.  415 

believe  in  his  dreams  might  account  for  the  origin  of  his 
religious  belief.  It  is  more  reasonable  to  suppose  that 
these  visions  would  have  a  more  direct  bearing  on  the 
primitive  man's  beliefs  about  his  own  soul,  its  existence 
and  immortality.  Moreover,  it  will  be  conceded,  I  think, 
that  the  dream,  whatever  its  substance  might  be,  would 
have  to  be  taken  up  by  the  primitive  man  in  his  waking 
moments  and  reflectively  adjudged  superhuman  before  it 
could  have  a  permanent  religious  significance  for  him. 
Even  the  savage  mind  will  not  fail  to  distinguish  between 
the  merely  strange  and  unusual  and  what  it  deems  to  be 
supernatural.  In  other  words,  the  savage  mind  would  not 
be  wholly  destitute  of  the  germ  of  a  distinction  between 
natural  and  supernatural ;  one  that  would  not  be  altogether 
coincident  with  his  distinction  between  the  usual  and  the 
strange  or  unusual.  What  he  adjudged  supernatural 
would  be  a  wonder  of  a  very  unusual  kind,  like  an  eclipse, 
and  one  that  would  overawe  his  mind  with  the  appearance 
of  power  that  was  not  only  mysterious  but  also  super- 
ordinary. 

These  considerations  will  be  sufficient,  I  think,  to  con- 
vince the  reflecting  mind  that  before  generalizing  on  the 
external  causes  of  religion  we  ought  to  investigate  more 
carefully  than  the  average  anthropologist  has  done,  the 
psychological  roots  of  religion  in  the  consciousness  of  man. 
The  time  has  long  passed  by  since  it  was  safe  for  the  student 
of  religion  to  neglect  psychology,  but  this  has  not  always 
been  recognized ;  with  the  result  that  much  otherwise  good 
anthropology  is  spoiled  by  the  lack  or  the  unsoundness  of 
the  psychological  presuppositions  which  underlie  it.  We 
propose  here  to  institute  a  search  for  the  original  roots  of 
religion  in  the  human  consciousness,  and  in  the  light  of 
the  results  to  point  out  what  we  deem  to  be  some  of  the 
shortcomings  of  the  current  anthropological  theories  of  its 
origin  and  development.  In  the  first  place,  however,  let 
us  try  to  reach  some  intelligible  conclusion  as  to  the  idea 
of  religion  and  what  it  involves.     We  are  not  seeking  to 


416  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

define  here,  but  simply  to  determine  what  it  is  in  a  religious 
experience  that  makes  it  a  truly  religious  and  not  some 
other  kind  of  experience.  Of  course,  religion  will  have  its 
ritual  and  its  institutional  features  which  outwardly  differ- 
entiate it  from  other  external  forms  of  experience.  But 
back  of  the  ritual  and  the  institution  will  be  the  religious 
consciousness.  That  thought-  and  emotion-complex,  which 
we  call  the  religious  consciousness, — what  is  it?  I  think  we 
shall  be  led  to  say,  after  looking  over  all  the  results  of  inves- 
tigation into  the  religious  ideas  of  the  lowest  savages,  that 
the  idea  of  religion  could  not  arise  in  the  experience  of  one 
who  had  not  in  some  way  become  conscious  of  relatedness 
to  some  mysterious  being  outside  of  himself  that  impressed 
him  as  being  superhuman;  that  is,  free  from  some  of  the 
ordinary  limitations  of  humanity,  but  that,  notwithstand- 
ing, was  in  many  respects  also  like  man  himself, — a  being 
of  his  own  order,  yet  in  a  sense  super  ordinary.  It  is  in 
this  synthesis  of  the  ordinary  human  and  the  super  ordi- 
nary that  we  seem  to  find  the  pith  of  the  consciousness  that 
may  be  called  religious.  Let  us  attempt  to  cancel  either 
factor,  and  religion  vanishes,  leaving  in  its  place  either  the 
purely  social  or  a  mere  sense  of  mystery  that  does  not  know 
whether  to  be  religious  or  not. 

There  must  be,  it  seems  to  me,  so  much  of  an  intel- 
lectual germ  in  religion  in  order  that  it  may  exist  at  all; 
and  this  I  say  with  some  diffidence  because,  if  I  understand 
a  position  that  is  held  by  some  eminent  thinkers  of  the 
present,  it  is  that  religion  has  no  original  intellectual  con- 
tent, its  primary  substance  being  purely  instinctive  or 
emotional,  and  its  ideas  being  symbols  that  do  not  rest  on 
any  primary  content  of  representation.  The  claim,  how- 
ever, that  religious  ideas  are  symbolic,  does  not  rob  them 
of  all  primary  intellectual  content.  A  symbol  will  define 
vaguely  and  indirectly,  if  not  directly,  and  it  will  convey 
some  real  meaning.  The  symbol  in  the  mind  of  the  savage, 
while  perhaps  it  carried  no  intuition,  would  indirectly 
characterize  the  hidden  object.     Thus  in  the  case  of  the 


chap.  iv.  KELIGION.  417 

fetich,  the  stone  or  the  ring  would  be  the  symbol  of  some 
being  that  the  savage  is  interested  to  propitiate,  and 
the  eclipse  would  represent  some  terrible  and  all-power- 
ful agent.  If  so  much  defining  power  be  allowed  to 
the  symbol  of  religion,  then  I  can  admit  that  religious 
ideas  are  largely  symbolic.  But  the  doctrine  of  symbolism 
is  not  inconsistent  with  the  presence  of  some  original  intel- 
lectual content  in  religious  experience.  If  there  were  not 
this  original  content,  it  is  difficult  to  see  how  the  religious 
emotions  could  arise  or  possess  any  definite  quality. 

Proceeding,  then,  to  determine  the  psychological  roots 
of  religion  in  consciousness,  we  shall  consider  first  its  intel- 
lectual ground.  That  the  religious  consciousness  has  a  pri- 
mary root  in  the  intellect  can,  I  think,  be  clearly  made  out. 
We  must  be  careful  here  to  distinguish  the  object  that  ex- 
cites the  religious  consciousness  from  the  conscious  reaction 
itself,  which  is  the  savage's  construction  of  the  object.  The 
latter,  we  claim,  will  not  only  be  what  he  feels  about  it, 
but  also  what  he  thinks  about  it.  There  can  be  no  social 
experience  without  some  form  of  social  cognition,  and 
there  can  be  no  religious  experience  without  some  species 
of  religious  cognition.  If  the  sense  or  feeling  of  the  tran- 
scendence of  the  object  of  religion  be  primary  to  the 
religious  consciousness,  then  we  cannot  escape  the  con- 
clusion that  the  idea  of  the  object  will  be  implicit  in  this 
first  experience  as  it  is  implicit  in  every  form  of  primary 
sensation.  Furthermore,  historically,  religious  ideas  seem 
to  have  arisen  as  early  at  least  as  any  other  species  of  intel- 
lectual content.  We  shall  develop  the  position  in  a  later 
chapter  that  man's  first  religious  experience  is  a  function 
of  his  objective  consciousness  and  that  it  depends  directly 
on  a  representation,  or  rather,  a  presentation,  upon  which 
the  subject-activities  of  thought  and  feeling  begin  imme- 
diately to  play.  To  deny  to  religion  an  intellectual  content 
is  to  reduce  it  to  pure  subjectivity.  But  the  subjective 
theory,  as  we  shall  see,  is  unable  to  account  for  the  most 
characteristic  feature  of  religion. 
27 


418  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

We  shall  find  another  and  vitally  important  psycholog- 
ical root  in  the  emotions.  I  say  emotions  rather  than  feelings 
in  order  to  emphasize  the  fact  that  religion  is  a  function  of 
the  reflective  consciousness.  I  do  not  mean,  of  course,  that 
spontaneity  does  not  enter  largely  into  religious  expe- 
riences. But  it  is  clear  that  the  ground-symbol  of  religion 
arises  as  an  interpretation  which  the  savage  mind  puts  on 
phenomena  that  might  be  construed  in  other  ways,  but  not 
by  the  savage  himself.  The  emotional  root  is  a  reaction  upon 
this  symbol  and,  therefore,  primarily  dependent  on  it. 
Now,  feeling,  as  we  have  already  shown,  becomes  emotion 
when  it  is  a  reaction  of  consciousness  upon  a  complex  situa- 
tion. The  elements  of  this  situation  will  doubtless  call  up 
their  appropriate  feeling-reactions;  the  unusualness  will 
cause  surprise,  the  magnitude  of  it  will  call  forth  wonder, 
while  the  mystery  of  it  will  cause  perplexity.  But  none  of 
these,  nor  a  complex  of  them,  constitutes  the  religious 
emotion  proper.  They  will  be  associates  of  it  and  will  no 
doubt  enter  into  it  to  qualify  it,  but  the  religious  feeling 
proper  will  be,  not  the  feeling-reaction  upon  the  presented 
object,  but  upon  the  construction  which  the  savage  puts  upon 
this  presented  object;  that  is,  on  what  he  thinks  it  to  be  or 
to  represent.  This  is  another  point  in  religious  theory  on 
which  we  need  to  be  clear.  The  religious  emotion  will  be 
that  complex  of  fear,  respect,  awe,  veneration,  submission, 
worship,  that  the  manifest  agency  of  the  superordinary 
being  to  whom  the  savage  ascribes  these  manifestations 
would  naturally  call  forth.  Such  emotions  as  these  would 
x  doubtless  constitute  the  nucleus  of  any  religious  experience. 
But  the  savage,  being  a  reflecting  as  well  as  an  ignorant 
and  superstitious  person,  would  very  soon  develop  around 
these  primary  emotions  a  cluster  of  secondary  ones  of  a  less 
purely  religious  character.  These  would  be  fear,  terror, 
servility,  or  desire  to  propitiate,  leading  to  the  institution 
of  any  sort  of  charm  or  sacrifice  that  might  seem  adequate 
to  appease  the  deity  and  turn  away  from  him  its  power  or 
disposition  to  do  him  harm.     In  short,  the  superstition  of 


chap.  iv.  EELIGION.  419 

the  savage  would  not  arise  directly  out  of  his  religious 
emotions,  but  in  connection  with  them,  and  would  tend 
either  to  modify  or  suppress  them. 

We  have  been  dealing  with  the  ideal  and  emotional  roots 
of  religion.  These,  however,  do  not  constitute  its  deepest 
spring  in  our  nature.  The  intellect  and  the  emotions  play 
around  some  object  to  which  man  is  more  deeply  related  than 
through  his  mental  and  emotional  reactions.  Man  in  the 
exercise  of  will  becomes  an  agent  in  his  world,  and  it  is 
through  the  deeper  reactions  of  his  agency  upon  an  agency 
which  transcends  him  that  his  fundamental  religious  expe- 
rience arises,  for  it  is  in  this  that  his  sense  of  the  transcend- 
ence of  the  object  will  arise  and  from  it  his  own  sense  of 
dependence,  or,  speaking  more  truly,  helplessness,  will  arise. 
This  is  perhaps  the  deepest  root  of  religion,  since  it  springs 
directly  out  of  the  interaction  of  man 's  will  with  the  agency 
that  he  learns  to  call  divine.  Moreover,  it  is  in  connection 
with  the  deeper  volitional  reactions  that  we  come  upon  the 
distinctly  ethical  roots  of  religion.  The  primary  ethical  con- 
sciousness, at  least  in  its  religious  aspect,  may  be  followed 
back  to  its  root  in  man's  deep  sense  of  dependence  on  God, 
however  the  being  he  calls  God  may  be  conceived.  For  it 
is  natural  for  him  to  look  to  that  which  has  the  mastery 
over  him  for  the  supreme  law  of  his  being.  The  sense 
of  morality  is  in  its  roots  very  closely  allied  to  the  sense  of 
power.  It  is  only  when  we  regard  these  roots  of  religion 
as  acting  together  in  consciousness  that  we  can  form  an 
idea  of  the  way  in  which  the  religious  ideas  and  emotions 
emerge  and  develop  in  man's  experience.  The  two  leading 
processes  in  consciousness  by  which  this  is  achieved  may  be 
called  personalization  and  deification. 

We  saw  in  the  preceding  chapter  how  the  emotional 
and  the  intellectual  motives  coalesce  into  a  result  which 
we  called  the  principle  of  the  highest  rationality,  and  we 
saw  how  this  principle  leads  to  a  synthesis  of  individuality 
and  unity  in  the  assertion  of  a  unification  that  is  grounded 
in  individuality  as  the  final  form  of  unity  in  the  world.    We 


420  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

also  saw  how  the  emotional  synthesis  leads  to  the  qualifying 
of  unitary  individuality  with  the  warmth  and  specializa- 
tion of  varying  and  plural  interests.  Personality,  when  it 
carries  in  it  the  germ  of  the  unitary  individuality  of  self, 
becomes  the  fruitful  norm  of  all  the  analogies  which  ws 
employ  in  determining  the  character  of  objective  existence. 
Of  course,  the  savage  is  neither  a  psychologist  nor  a  meta- 
physician, but  it  is  only  when  we  have  achieved  an  analyzed 
insight  into  the  nature  of  personality  that  Ave  are  able  to 
put  into  terms  of  our  own  thought  what  the  savage  actually 
does  in  his  simplest  religious  reflection.  His  personifica- 
tion is  not  identical  with  deification  in  any  sense.  This 
latter  is  given  in  the  first  experience  that  determines  the 
object  as  a  superhuman  or  transcendent  being  or  cause. 
The  personalization  completes  the  task  by  transferring  to 
this  superior  object  the  attributes  and  prerogatives  of  our 
own  personality.  The  personalization  means  that  we  put 
the  deity  in  our  own  place,  as  it  were,  where  he  stands  in 
like  intellectual  and  emotional  attitudes  to  his  world  as  do 
we  ourselves,  and  by  virtue  of  this,  naturally  comes  into  the 
same  relationships  and  holds  the  same  prerogatives.  Only, 
he  is  deity,  a  superhuman  and  supernatural  something,  to 
start  with,  and  so  becomes  a  superhuman  and  supernatural 
self,  and  therefore  a  superhuman  and  supernatural  person. 
The  personification  and  deification  are  two  distinct  proc- 
esses and  must  be  accounted  for,  therefore,  on  distinct 
grounds. 

This  leads  us  to  consider  specially  the  religious  root  of 
the  deifying  process  in  religion.  It  is  what  I  call  the  sense 
of  transcendence.  I  am  not  disposed  to  accept  Max  Miiller's 
faculty  of  sensing  the  infinite,  but  point  to  it  here  as  an  ex- 
ample of  the  recognition  of  what  I  call  the  root  of  tran- 
scendence. There  is  that  in  what  we  call  the  sense  of 
transcendence,  which  I  think  we  shall  find,  in  the  last  analy- 
sis, to  be  inexplicable.  In  this,  however,  it  is  not  altogether 
singular,  for  in  every  act  of  cognition  there  is  what  Professor 
Ladd  calls  the  "trans-subjective  reference"  and  which  he 


chap.  iv.  EELIGION.  421 

regards  as  an  ultimate  fact  of  cognition.  I  have  endeavored 
to  sIioav  in  my  Foundations  of  Knowledge  in  the  sections  on 
the  Categories  of  Knowledge,  how  the  categories  bridge  the  / 
gulf  between  subject  and  object  by  exhibiting  the  synthetic 
character  of  combined  subjectivity  and  objectivity,  but  in 
different  aspects  and  in  performing  different  functions.  The 
exhibition  of  this  character,  however,  shows  it  to  be  irredu- 
cible to  anything  simpler  than  itself,  and  in  that  sense, 
therefore,  inexplicable.  We  take  it,  that  the  feeling  of  tran-* 
scendence  is  in  this  sense  inexplicable.  It  is  there  as  a  fact 
and  we  must  accept  it  at  its  face  value.  But  it  is  not  diffi- 
cult to  exhibit  the  kind  of  experience  that  stimulates  this 
feeling  and  brings  it  into  clear  consciousness.  In  tracing 
the  grounds  of  religion,  some  thinkers  have  fixed  upon  the 
feeling  of  dependence  as  its  primitive  source.  But  I  ven-  ' 
ture  to  maintain  that  the  fact  of  religion,  involved  here, 
is  not  the  mere  sense  of  dependence.  We  have  the  feeling 
of  dependence  in  connection  with  our  social  others.  We 
have  it  with  reference  to  the  branch  we  are  standing  on. 
We  have  it,  too,  with  reference  to  nature,  and  here  it  comes 
closer  to  the  religious  feeling.  The  fact  of  the  religious 
feeling  is  not  so  much  the  sense  of  dependence,  as  the  feel- 
ing that  with  reference  to  the  deity  we  have  no  standing  in  • 
existence  at  all  apart  from  him.  That  the  grounds  of  our 
existence  transcend  us  is  our  profoundest  feeling.  We  are 
not  always  thinking  of  our  existence,  but  wTe  are  assured 
that  God  is  always  thinking  of  it  and  so  it  is  maintained. 
We  do  not  know  what  will  be  good  for  us,  but  we  are  assured 
that  God  knows,  and  the  good  will  be  secured.  I  am  not 
saying  that  the  savage  goes  through  any  such  reflection, 
though  it  is  very  simple  and  a  child  understands  and  is 
satisfied  with  it.  My  daughter  Margaret,  who  is  twelve, 
comes  to  me  and  says,  "Papa,  we  think  we  know  so  many 
things  that  will  be  for  our  good  which  turn  out  not  to  be  so. 
How  are  we  to  know  that  our  whole  lives  will  not  turn  out 
the  same  way?"  A  pretty  searching  question,— to  which  I 
answer,  "But  God  knows  what  is  good  for  us,  Margaret," 


422  SYNTHESIS.  PART  II. 

and  she  goes  away  satisfied.  I  am  not  saying  that  the 
savage  can  reason  as  profoundly  as  twelve-year-old  Mar- 
garet. His  feeling  that  he  has  no  standing  in  existence 
apart  from  the  deity  would,  no  doubt,  express  itself  in  two 
of  his  primal  religious  emotions,  respect  and  submission, 
the  latter  arising  in  view  of  his  helplessness  as  against  the 
power  of  the  deity;  the  former  an  ethical  feeling  or 
germinal  conviction  that  this  larger  personality  with  the 
prerogatives  has  the  right  to  command  him.  His  respect 
is  a  kind  of  recognition  and  assent  to  the  supreme  moral 
right  of  the  other  being  to  command  his  obedience.  Any 
savage  could  have  these  feelings  in  germ  at  least.  From 
the  religious  point  of  view,  then,  the  root  of  transcendence 
is  the  feeling  of  physical  and  moral  subordination  that 
arises  in  the  mind  when  it  contemplates  the  transcendent 
object  which  it  calls  deity. 

Beyond  the  distinctively  individual  sources  we  find  that 
religion  has  important  grounds  in  sociality.  There  is  an 
important  sense  in  which  religion  is  distinctively  a  social 
phenomenon,  a  product  not  of  the  individual  but  of  the 
individual  as  a  socius  and  as  a  member  of  a  social  com- 
munity. We  cannot  say  how  far  the  isolated  individual 
could  go  in  developing  a  religious  sense,  for  the  simple 
reason  that  we  cannot  say  how  far  the  individual  could 
develop  at  all  apart  from  social  conditions.  It  is  probable 
enough  that,  were  it  possible  for  our  individual  con- 
sciousness to  develop  at  all  in  a  social  vacuum,  we  might 
unfold  some  kind  of  a  religious  sense.  But  the  whole  situa- 
tion represents  a  hypothesis  of  the  illegitimate  kind.  What 
we  know  about  conscious  beings  is  that,  genetically,  they 
respond  to  social  motives  before  they  begin  to  respond  to 
the  motives  of  religion.  The  relation  here  to  the  religious 
and  the  ethical  is  a  common  one.  Both  ethics  and  religion 
belong  to  the  reflective  consciousness  and  arise  relatively 
later  than  sociality.  We  distinguish  here,  of  course, 
the  institutional  and  ritualistic  sides  of  religion  in  which 
it    is    purely    social,    from    the     religious     consciousness 


chap.  iv.  BELIGION.  423 

composed  of  feelings  and  ideas,  which  has  ultra-social 
roots.  We  are  here  considering  the  social  roots  and  have 
agreed  that,  in  an  important  respect  all  religion  arises  out 
of  social  soil.  This  is  a  vague  statement,  however,  and  we 
naturally  wish  to  know  something  about  how  it  arises. 
Now,  the  social  consciousness  being  first  on  the  ground  and 
having  accustomed  the  savage  to  the  recognition  of  other 
beings  like  himself,  the  religious  consciousness  would  arise 
when  this  norm  of  the  other-than-self  consciousness  found 
itself  in  relation  with  a  transcendent  object.  The  deity 
thus  becomes  the  transcendent  other  than  self,  or  the 
transcendent  other  self.  No  doubt  the  savage  does  not 
think  in  these  terms,  but  he  thinks  in  simpler  terms  that 
we  may  call  the  progenitors  of  these,  and  that  lead  to  the 
same  result.  "When  we  say  then  that  religion,  in  the  sense 
we  are  using  the  term  here,  has  roots  in  sociality,  we  mean 
that  a  social  analogy— that  of  the  social  other— is  involved 
in  its  very  foundations.  The  object  of  religion  is  thus  a 
modified  type  of  the  social  other,  and  the  modification  is 
wrought  by  the  function  of  the  principle  of  transcendence. 
We  see,  then,  how  transcendence  and  sociality  are  inter- 
woven in  the  very  foundations  of  religion. 

In  this  part  of  our  discussion  we  distinguish,  of  course, 
between  the  two  phases  of  religion,  by  virtue  of  which  it  is 
on  one  side  an  element  of  personal  and  social  experience, 
and  on  the  other,  a  public  affair  of  ritual  and  institutions. 
The  latter,  which  is  almost  the  only  one  considered  in  Mr. 
Spencer's  treatment,  we  do  not  deal  with  directly  here, 
though  we  expect  to  have  something  to  say  about  it  later. 
But  it  will  be  admitted  that  religion  as  a  personal  and  social 
experience  presents  the  more  fundamental  aspect.  If 
there  were  no  personal  and  social  experiences  of  religion, 
there  could  of  course  be  no  ritualistic  and  institutional 
religious  life  except,  perhaps,  as  it  could  be  developed  by 
pure  fraud  and  priestly  jugglery.  At  all  events,  it  seems 
clear  that  an  adequate  theory  of  religion  must  be  founded 
on  a  true  analysis  of  the  religious  consciousness. 


424  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

Returning,  then,  to  the  question  of  the  roots  of  re- 
ligious experience,  we  have  now  traced  the  principal 
psychological  and  social  elements.  But  we  have  not  as  yet 
completely  exhausted  the  theme.  It  is  of  course  recognized 
that  there  is  a  very  important  ethical  content  in  religion. 
So  little  is  this  in  dispute  that  the  tendency  with  some  is 
to  claim  that  the  whole  legitimate  content  of  religion  is 
ethical.  This  was  first  the  contention  of  Kant  who,  as  we 
know,  approached  the  religious  problem  from  the  stand- 

'  points  of  ethics  and  epistemology.  But  more  recent 
thinkers  are  setting  forth  the  same  doctrine  as  a  dictum  of 
psychology.  Now,  I  am  prepared  to  admit  that  a  large 
part  of  the  most  vital  content  of  religion  is  ethical,  but  I 
am  not  ready  to  go  Kant's  length  and  say  virtually  that 
religion  has  no  other  province  than  that  of  a  feeder  to 
ethics,  and  no  other  content  than  matter  of  duty.  The 
position  we  are  maintaining  here  is,  however,  in  favor  of 
some  ethical  content.  For  we  maintain  not  only  an  ethical 
content  but  also  an  ethical  root  of  religion.  It  is  not 
probable  that  man  would  have  sufficient  motive  for  the 
development  of  vital  religion  were  this  ethical  root  ex- 
tracted from  his  consciousness.  What,  then,  is  the  ethical 
root  of  religion?  In  our  analysis  of  ethics  we  have  found 
that  it  is  largely  the  product  of  the  reflective  consciousness. 

"Its  central  pressure-point  is  that  of  the  ought  of  duty. 
This  ought  pushes  itself  up  into  the  field  of  reflection  and 
the  judgment  to  which  it  gives  rise  is  a  reflective  judgment. 
It  is  also  a  decision  of  will  which,  in  view  of  the  fact  that 
it  rises  out  of  the  conscious  opposition  of  desire  and  obliga- 
tion, becomes  a  vera  causa  and  marks  the  epochal  point  at 
which  human  conduct  passes  from  the  control  of  natural 
causation  and  becomes  the  function  of  freedom.  I  am  not 
free  in  a  transcendental  sense,  when  I  decide,  and  at  the 
same  time  determined  by  natural  causation.  But  I  am 
determined  by  natural  causation  when  I  follow  the  pull  of 
desire  in  preference  to  the  injunction  of  duty,  whereas, 
I  am  free  and  decide  according  to  the  law  of  freedom  when 


chap.  iv.  KELIGION.  425 

I  obey  the  law  of  obligation.  In  any  middle  field  where 
the  two  forces  pnll  together  or  in  a  neutral  field  where  no 
pressure  of  duty  is  felt,  the  issue  of  freedom  would  scarcely 
arise;  for  as  we  have  already  maintained,  the  question  of 
freedom  is  one  of  idle  speculation  except  where  the  alter- 
native of  obligation  is  present. 

The  ethical  root  of  religion  is  unfolded  in  that  act  of 
investiture  by  which  the  savage  clothes  the  transcendent 
object  with  the  vestments  and  prerogatives  of  his  own 
personality.  The  consequence  is  that  the  object  becomes 
an  ethical  personality,  not  only  clothed  with  moral  attri- 
butes but  bearing  moral  prerogatives.  We  have  seen  how, 
in  general,  obligation  can  only  maintain  its  absoluteness 
by  metaphysical  reference  to  a  supreme,  all-comprehend- 
ing personality.  And  here  the  transcendent  object  or 
deity  stands  to  the  savage  as  the  supreme,  whose  right  it 
is,  therefore,  to  command  and  be  obeyed.  Hence  his 
respect  and  submission,  which  are  his  ways  of  assenting  to 
the  law  of  the  higher  personality  as  obligatory.  Of  course, 
we  do  not  at  all  think  that  the  savage  would  go  through 
all  this  reflection,  but  after  all,  when  we  think  of  it,  is  there 
any  simpler  way  of  interpreting  what  he  does,  than  this? 
The  ethical  root  of  his  religion  is  thus  to  seek  in  the  ethical 
personality  which  he  ascribes  to  his  deity,  and  this  root  not 
only  sprouts  into  its  appropriate  ethical  qualities  but  im- 
parts an  ethical  complexion  to  the  whole  divine  character. 

Few  religionists  would  be  satisfied,  however,  with  the 
Kantian  reduction  of  religion  to  the  position  of  a  mere 
surrogate  to  morality.  They  would  claim  for  religion 
interests  and  motives  that  are  extra-ethical,  and  in  that 
position  we  are  prepared  here  to  extend  them  aid  and  com- 
fort. There  are  roots  of  religion  that  are  not  distinctively 
ethical,  and  one  of  these  is  distinctively  aesthetic.  That 
there  is  an  emotional  content  in  religion  all  theorists  are 
at  one  in  claiming.  A  religion  without  feeling  would  be 
no  religion  at  all.  Even  Hegel's  "thinking  is  also  wor- 
ship," is  no  exception  to  the  rule  and  was  not  meant  to  be 


426  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

so  by  Hegel  himself.  Sometimes  the  claims  for  emotion 
are  extreme,  as  in  the  case  of  the  mystics  and  pietists  of 
all  grades.  Even  so  sturdy  a  moralist  as  Matthew  Arnold 
defines  religion  as  ' '  morality  touched  with  emotion, ' '  recog- 
nizing at  least  an  extra-ethical  content.  What  is  main- 
tained here,  however,  is  that  there  is  a  distinct  emotional 
root  in  religion,  and  when  you  ask  me  to  say  what  it  is  I 
answer,  personality.  In  ethics  it  is  the  form,  the  law  of 
personality  that  commands  and  exacts  obedience.  But  the 
content  is  in  the  background,  whereas  in  religion,  while  the 
form  impresses  the  will,  the  rich  content  appeals  to  the 
feelings.  Why?  Because  personality,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  an  emotional  category.  It  comes  to  us  charged  with 
feeling,  and  we  instinctively  love  it  because  it  is  sweet,  or 
admire  it  because  it  is  beautiful  and  worship  it  in  the 
"beauty  of  holiness"  because  it  is  altogether  lovely  and  sat- 
isfying. When  religion  appeals  to  us  in  its  personal 
concreteness  with  all  the  rich  content  of  a  freighted  con- 
scious experience,  do  we  marvel  that  it  has  power  to  arouse 
other  emotions  than  the  ethical,  or  that  it  has  power  to 
infuse  unwonted  fire  into  the  ethical  emotions  themselves? 
Not  only  has  religion  a  distinctive  emotional  root,  but  it 
exercises  a  function  which  we  have  seen  to  belong  to  emo- 
tion in  general ;  namely,  that  of  stimulating  the  intelligence 
to  the  development  of  new  religious  ideas.  We  have  seen 
how  the  coalescence  of  thought  and  feeling  leads  to  the  idea 
of  the  highest  rationality.  Now,  there  are  certain  ideas  in 
religion  which  have  always  been  regarded  as  in  some 
respects  at  least  ultra-ethical.  Of  course,  the  idea  of 
God  involves  ultra-ethical  conceptions.  But  aside  from 
that,  what  is  admitted  to  be  one  of  the  final  conceptions  of 
religious  experience,— the  idea  of  the  unification  of  the 
human  and  the  divine;  and  the  idea  of  mediation,  the 
means  of  effecting  this  unification, — has  at  least  ultra  - 
ethical  aspects.  The  notion  of  personal  identity  with  the 
source  of  the  law  is  an  ultra-ethical  conception.  If  we 
dissociate  the  idea  of  mediation  from  that  of  expiation 


chap.  iv.  EELIGION.  427 

with  which  it  has  nothing  intrinsically  in  common,  it  be- 
comes simply  the  vicarious  notion  of  some  common  medium 
in  which  two  otherwise  separate  personalities  come  together 
and  coalesce.  Mediation  thus  represents  the  dramatic 
side  of  unification. 

That  these  are  almost  purely  emotional  ideas,  or  at  least 
that  they  are  emotion-inspired  ideas,  becomes  apparent  when 
we  consider  the  types  of  religion  in  which  they  are  promi- 
nent. In  the  lower  forms  of  religion  we  should  expect  to 
find  them  present  but  so  complicated  with  other  elements 
as  in  most  cases  to  be  hardly  recognizable.  But  in  more 
developed  types,  in  Judaism  for  example,  where  the  vital 
element  is  the  ethical,  we  find  the  idea  of  unity  scarcely 
showing  itself  and  mediation  almost  submerged  in  the  no- 
tions of  expiation  and  sacrifice;  whereas,  in  Christianity, 
which  gives  more  scope  to  feeling,  we  find  the  ideas  of  unifi- 
cation and  mediation  reaching  their  climax  in  the  mystical 
conceptions  of  St.  John.  The  emotional  thus  not  only  con- 
tributes important  roots  to  religion,  but  also  elements  of 
content  that  are  ultra-ethical. 

We  have  been  thus  elaborate  in  tracing  the  grounds  of 
religion  in  various  regions  of  conscious  experience,  for  two 
reasons  mainly.  In  the  first  place,  it  is  not  usual  to  attempt 
an  exhaustive  treatment  of  such  a  subject  with  anything 
like  the  insight  into  the  nature  of  the  problem  that  is 
needed  in  order  to  insure  fruitful  results.  Such  inquiries 
have,  as  a  rule,  been  left  to  two  sets  of  persons;  either  to 
anthropologists  whose  knowledge  of  religion  as  a  conscious 
experience  may  not  have  been  very  profound  and  whose 
dominating  interests  are  altogether  secular ;  or,  to  dogmatists 
of  either  the  philosophical  or  theological  type,  who,  without 
even  a  hasty  analysis,  seize  upon  one  or  two  generalizations 
that  seem  to  harmonize  with  their  already  determined 
points  of  view,  employing  these  as  substitutes  for  psy- 
chological and  philosophic  insight  as  well  as  for  patient 
investigation.  The  consequence  is  an  ever-widening  breach 
between  the  anthropologists  and  the  theologians  in  which 


428  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  former  show  signs  of  a  somewhat  decided  drift 
toward  materialism,  if  not  toward  atheism,  while  the  latter 
are  in  danger  of  being  brought  to  a  complete  standstill 
out  of  sheer  inability  to  appreciate  the  living  requirements 
of  their  problem.  The  second  reason  is  one  that  will  be 
more  fully  elaborated  in  following  chapters.  The  insight 
that  is  needed  in  order  to  equip  the  contemporary  an- 
thropologist for  his  work  will  be  defective  and  he  will  be 
in  important  respects  a  blind  guide  if  he  be  not  a  man  of 
trained  psychological  insight,  and  especially  if  he  have  not 
taken  pains  to  become  a  practiced  reasoner  in  many  fields 
of  thought.  Moreover,  while  it  is  the  fashion  to  denounce 
philosophy,  the  patient  thinking  that  leads  to  philosophic 
insight  will  not  be  found  by  the  student  of  religion  to  be 
the  least  valuable  of  his  possessions.  There  are,  no  doubt, 
other  elements  that  will  be  indispensable  to  his  equipment ; 
but  of  these  we  feel  sure.  The  student  of  religion,  in  order 
to  be  ideally  qualified  for  his  work,  needs  to  combine  the 
insight  of  the  specialist  with  the  breadth  of  sympathy 
that  come  from  a  generous  culture  and  a  genuine  interest 
in  religion. 


CHAPTER  V. 

ORIGIN  AND   DEVELOPMENT. 

As  regards  the  origin  of  religion,  one  of  the  vital  questions 
which  determine  the  lines  of  cleavage  in  theories  is,  whether 
man  is  a  being  of  such  a  nature  that  the  origin  of  such  a 
phenomenon  as  that  of  religion  in  his  experience  is  to  be 
accounted  for  in  a  purely  objective  and  experimental  way. 
Shall  we  suppose  that  man  came  upon  his  religion  as  he  did 
upon  the  objects  of  other  great  discoveries,  such  as  the  art 
of  navigation  or  gold  in  Peru?  And  on  this  supposition, 
shall  we  regard  the  problem  of  religion  as  one  of  purely 
objective  and  factual  investigation,  a  problem  the  terms 
of  which  are :  given  a  situation  in  which  religion  does 
not  yet  appear  as  a  phenomenon,  to  determine  the  ob- 
jective phenomena  from  which  and  the  process  through 
which,  religion  appeared  and  developed  as  a  feature  of  the 
history  of  the  race  ?  We  may  admit  the  possibility  of  such 
a  method  of  procedure.  In  fact,  nothing  is  easier  to  imagine. 
But  the  suspicion  will  inevitably  arise  here  that  it  is  alto- 
gether too  easy  and  that  the  real  terms  of  the  problem 
include  more  than  appears  on  the  surface.  Such  a  suspi- 
cion would  be  changed  to  certainty,  I  think,  in  the  mind  of 
one  who  had  followed  some  such  course  of  inquiry  as  that 
of  the  preceding  chapter,  in  search  of  the  roots  of  religion. 
We  do  not  hold  a  brief  for  any  special  theory  of  religion, 
but  it  is  clear  that  if  the  position  of  the  last  chapter 
be  true  and  religion  be  grounded  in  conscious  experience  by 

429 


430  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

means  of  so  many  fundamental  roots,  then  we  must  look 
for  important  subjective  and  psychological  data  to  sup- 
plement the  purely  objective  data  on  which  current 
theories  seem  disposed  to  rest  their  case.  If  we  occupy 
the  general  philosophical  ground  of  this  discussion,  assert- 
ing the  reality  of  consciousness  and  its  primacy  in  the 
world,  then,  having  by  investigation  discovered  that  relig- 
ion is  rooted  in  various  ways  in  the  depths  of  man's  con- 
sciousness, it  will  follow  without  question  that  no  theory 
of  the  origin  and  growth  of  religion  which  neglects  these 
roots  can  make  any  reasonable  pretensions  to  adequacy. 
But  on  the  other  hand,  on  the  supposition  that  conscious- 
ness be  regarded  as  a  pure  phenomenon  and  not  as  a  vera 
causa;  even  then  the  subjective  roots,  if  they  be  shown  to 
exist  in  consciousness,  could  not  be  overlooked  with  im- 
punity by  any  one  who  is  investigating  the  origin  or 
growth  of  religion. 

Now  the  views  as  to  the  origin  and  development  of 
religion  among  men,  so  far  as  they  have  definitely  formu- 
lated themselves,  may  be  classified  under  two  heads,  (1) 
what  may  be  called  the  anthropological  theory,  inasmuch 
as  it  has  received  the  endorsement  of  those  anthropologists 
who  have  held  the  balance  of  power  in  their  science,  (2) 
the  theory  or  theories  of  those  who  hold  that  the  origin  and 
development  of  religion  are  a  legitimate  object  of  scientific 
investigation  but  who  for  various  reasons  dissent  from  the 
anthropological  theory.  Among  the  anthropologists  we 
may  rank  such  names  as  Huxley,  Spencer,  Tylor,  Brinton, 
while  in  the  opposing  school  among  those  who  dissent  from 
the  anthropologists  on  other  than  theological  grounds  we 
have  Max  Muller,  psychologists  like  James,  and  more 
recently,  Andrew  Lang.  It  is  not  my  purpose  here  to  take 
sides,  but  rather  to  develop  an  independent  criticism  taking 
its  departure  from  the  results  of  the  investigation  into  the 
roots  of  religion  in  the  preceding  chapter.  The  most  con- 
venient method  of  developing  that  criticism  will  be  in  a 
review  of  the  anthropological  theory  in  which  we  find  the 


chap.  v.  OEIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  43 1 

issues  most  clearly  stated  or  at  least  suggested.  What, 
then,  is  the  body  of  theory  to  which  the  name  anthropolog- 
ical has  been  applied?  We  answer  that  it  is  that  body  of 
conclusions  in  which  a  number  of  investigators  of  divergent 
views,  and  prosecuting  their  work  for  the  most  part  inde- 
pendently of  the  trammels  of  the  schools,  have  been  found 
to  substantially  agree.  These  points  of  agreement  will, 
moreover,  be  found  to  lie  around  three  main  centers,  (1) 
the  data  and  origin  of  religion,  (2)  the  processes  and  stages 
of  its  development,  (3)  the  significance  of  the  movement 
of  religion. 

The  data  with  which  the  anthropologist  starts  are 
obtained  by  constructing  the  status  and  environment  of  the 
primitive,  pre-religious  man  from  a  comparative  study  of 
the  savage  religious  man  of  the  present.  This  is  the  near- 
est approach  that  can  be  made  to  the  original  sources, 
For  while  it  is  a  debatable  question,  with  the  weight  of 
authority  against  it,  whether  any  non-religious  savage  tribe 
can  be  found  in  existence  at  present,  yet  even  were  such 
tribes  existent  we  could  have  no  assurance  that  their  lack 
of  religious  ideas  was  due  to  insufficient  development.  It 
might  be  due  to  race-stupidity.  Taking  the  low  races  of 
savages  and  investigating  their  religious  ideas  and  beliefs 
and  customs,  certain  generalizations  are  reached  signaliz- 
ing certain  common  features  which  recur  generally  in,  and 
in  connection  with,  the  variations  that  mark  different  forms 
of  savage  belief.  Having  by  this  objective  investigation 
extracted  what  they  regard  as  the  common  features  from 
the  variant  religious  experiences  of  the  savage  life  of  the 
present,  the  anthropologist  is  in  a  position  to  construct  a 
theory  of  the  rise  and  development  of  religion  among 
primitive,  pre-religious  men.  And  it  is  clear  from  this 
that  from  the  same  data  the  theory  of  the  primitive, 
pre-religious  man  himself  will  have  to  be  constructed. 
Let  us  ask,  then,  (1)  what  this  theory  of  the  primi- 
tive, pre-religious  man  is,  and  (2)  what  are  the  main 
features  of  the  theory  of  his  religious  history?     The  first 


432  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

question  is  capable  of  a  very  simple  answer.  Taking  the 
lower  savages  whose  religions  have  already  been  generalized 
on  the  basis  of  their  minimum  of  common  content,  these 
savages  are  supposed  to  have  been  in  their  primitive  state 
substantially  as  they  are  now,  except  that  they  were  abso- 
lutely without  religious  ideas  or  beliefs.  It  occurs  to  very 
few  of  the  investigators  that  stripping  off  the  religious 
elements  involves  an  all-around  disrobing,  so  that  the 
primitive,  pre-religious  man,  when  we  thus  find  him,  will  be 
perhaps  as  widely  different  from  the  lower  savages  as  we 
know  them  now,  as  these  are  from  the  most  civilized  and 
cultivated  races  of  the  present.  In  fact,  the  anthropolog- 
ical method  is  not  sufficiently  critical  at  this  point.  In 
order  to  avoid  misleading  analogies,  the  investigator  here 
needs  to  reduce  the  presumption  with  which  he  sets  out, 
by  conceiving  the  primitive  man  to  be  different  from  the 
modern  savage,  not  simply  in  his  religious  ideas,  but  in  the 
whole  make-up  of  his  being.  It  would  be  safe,  I  think,  to 
start  with  the  presumption  that  to  be  a  man  at  all,  and  not 
a  mere  animal,  involves  the  ability  to  have  some  ideas  of 
some  sort.  I  mean  by  that,  that  so  long  as  we  conceive  his 
life  to  be  one  of  pure  spontaneity  without  reflection,  our 
proto-man  could  only  be  regarded  as  perhaps  an  unusually 
gifted  animal.  He  would  need  to  be  able  to  seize  upon 
some  thought,  some  objective  representation,  and  turn  it 
around  reflectively,  before  he  could  realize  even  the  germ 
of  the  man-life.  Let  us  suppose,  now,  that  this  primitive 
being  whom  we  have  divested  of  religious  ideas,  has  been 
divested  also  of  reflection.  We  have  in  him  a  gifted  animal 
at  a  stage  of  highly  developed  spontaneity  where  he  is  ready 
to  break  the  crust  and  come  through  into  the  light  of  reflec- 
tion. How  does  he  get  through  ?  Why  not  through  a  unique 
variation?  The  genetic  psychologists  have  familiarized  us 
with  the  doctrine  of  the  genius,  the  gifted  individual  of  his 
class,  as  a  bearer  of  social  variations.  The  first  genius  in 
any  race  or  civilization  would  be  a  social  variation  that 
would  bring  in  something  new.     Why  should  not  the  first 


chap.  v.  OKIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  433 

variation  that  marks  the  breach  through  the  crust  of  spon- 
taneity into  the  life  of  reflection  be  one  of  a  distinctively 
religious  kind?  It  would  not  be  a  function  of  any  primi- 
tive being,  but  only  of  the  genius  of  his  race  or  tribe.  In 
short,  we  should  expect  this  step  to  be  taken  by  the  most 
gifted  rather  than  by  the  average  specimen  of  the  race. 
Now,  if  we  go  thus  far,  I  do  not  see  why  we  should  refuse 
to  go  farther  and  say  that  the  first  variation  of  the  reflect- 
ive kind  will  be  religious.  The  gifted  proto-human  would 
only  find  the  needed  stimulus  in  some  impressive  object  in 
his  objective  experience,  say  in  the  terrific  play  of  an  elec- 
tric storm,  or  in  some  unusual  appearance  of  the  heavens, 
say  an  eclipse  of  the  sun  in  midday,  or  some  great  convulsion 
of  nature,  that  would  knock  him  completely  out  of  his 
ordinary  reckoning,  and  force  him  into  the  distressing 
position  of  having  to  seek  a  new  mold  of  habit  for  his 
objective  experience.  We  do  not  need  to  go  into  details; 
but  the  sudden  and  violent  arrest  which  his  spontaneity 
had  received  would  lead  to  a  return  wave  of  conscious - 
reaction  upon  its  source,  the  disquieting  phenomenon,  and 
it  would  be  this  rather  than  any  form  of  subjective  expe- 
rience that  would  be  the  first  object  of  reflection,  or  we 
might  better  say,  the  first  reflected  object.  Now,  if  we  con- 
sider what  the  reflecting  of  this  object  would  mean  to  the 
primitive  proto-human,  it  will  be  clear  that  it  is  in  this  or 
some  such  experience  that  he  would  achieve  his  human 
stains.  The  experience  would  be  to  him  a  reflection  in  which 
for  the  first  time  in  his  life  he  becomes  aware  of  two  things 
coming  together  into  one  conscious  act,  (1)  the  spontaneous 
inference  of  which  we  have  found  the  ordinary  dog  capable, 
by  virtue  of  which  an  effect  in  consciousness  is  referred  to 
an  objective  existent,  and  (2)  the  representation  of  the 
unusual  objective  experience  which  reflection  has  trans- 
lated into  the  kind  of  a  symbol  which  naturally  calls  forth 
the  religious  feeling  in  the  mind  of  the  savage  of  the 
present.  "What  we  are  maintaining  here  is  the  probability 
that  the  variation  which  marked  the  transition  from  the 
28 


434  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

life  of  pure  spontaneity  to  that  of  reflection  was  one  of  the 
religious  species,  and  that  it  was  in  the  shock  by  which  the 
proto-human  became  a  man,  that  he  also  became  religious. 
-  The  first  man  would  thus  become  the  first  religious  prophet 
and  we  should  have  the  origin  of  religion  determined  as 
identical  with  the  origin  of  the  consciousness  that  is  dis- 
tinctively human.  In  other  words,  man  would  awake  to 
himself  and  to  his  sense  of  religion  in  one  and  the  same 
process;  but  in  this  process  the  objective  would  take  pre- 
cedence of  the  subjective  awakening. 

Now  we  have  no  disposition  to  read  any  advanced 
reflection  into  these  first  stages  of  experience.  On  the 
contrary,  we  have  been  ascribing  to  this  first  human  genius 
just  one  thing  that  is  beyond  even  the  ordinary  dog.  We 
are  not  deriving  the  religious  from  the  unusual,  simply, 
but  from  that  unique  species  of  the  unusual  which  we  know 
calls  forth  religious  feeling  in  the  savage  mind  of  the 
present.  The  ordinary  dog  will  not  be  a  stranger  to  these 
objects,  and  they  will  have  the  power  to  stir  in  him  a  kind 
of  dull  wonder,  or  perhaps  more  positive  emotions  of  fear, 
dread  or  apprehension.  But  he  will  lack  the  power  of 
doing  one  thing  that  this  proto-human  finds  himself  stimu- 
lated into  doing,  that  is,  to  reflect  his  object  and  change  it 
into  a  symbol  of  an  unknown  existent.  The  first  act  of 
reflection  will  take  this  objective  form,  and  in  ascribing 
it  to  this  proto-human  as  the  variation  that  makes  him  a 
man,  no  advanced  reflectiveness  has  been  accredited  to  him. 
This  might  be  admitted,  however,  without  putting  the 
religious  construction  on  the  first  acts  of  reflection.  We 
have  only  asserted  probability  here;  but  in  view  of  the 
considerations  urged  it  is  not  a  bare  probability  but  one 
fortified  with  a  weight  of  evidence  that  with  reflec- 
tion becomes  more  and  more  convincing.  It  would  be 
the  most  striking  and  impressive  of  objective  experiences 
that  would  be  most  likely  to  have  the  power  requisite  to 
produce  such  an  epochal  effect  as  the  beginning  of  re- 
flection. 


chap.  v.  OEIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  435 

The  second  question,  What  are  the  main  features  of 
the  religious  history  which  the  anthropologists  construct 
for  this  primitive,  pre-religious  man?  is  coincident  with 
the  second  main  topic — the  processes  and  stages  of  relig- 
ious development— and  the  two  may  therefore  be  treated 
together.  What  are  the  stages  and  processes  by  which 
the  religious  history  of  the  primitive  man  is  built  up? 
Looking  over  the  field  we  might  think  that  the  voices  repre- 
sent nothing  but  a  babel  of  confusion.  We  have  the  advo- 
cates of  the  ancestral-dream  theory,  the  ghost-ancestor 
theory,  animism,  fetichism,  and  totemism ;  all  falling  down 
before  their  own  favorite  idols,  and  outwardly,  Milton's 
expressive  phrase,  "Confusion  worse  confounded,"  would 
seem  to  be  applicable  here.  But  looking  below  the  surface 
we  soon  find  that  there  are  certain  points  of  fundamental 
consistency  and  that  out  of  the  disjecta  membra  a  tolerably 
coherent  theory  may  be  constructed.  For  example,  the 
ghost-  and  dream-theories  are  not  inconsistent  provided 
they  do  not  set  up  the  claim  of  exclusive  origin.  It  would 
seem  that  a  man  might  find  the  starting-point  of  a  spiritistic 
construction  in  either  the  dream  of  an  ancestor  or  in  the 
apparition  of  a  ghost.  For  what  he  would  need  would  be 
a  stimulus  and  an  occasion  for  the  personifying  imagina- 
tion which  he  would  already  possess  in  germ.  In  these 
primary  experiences,  the  advocates  of  the  theory  agree,  is 
to  be  found  the  origin  of  man's  belief  in  spirits  as  beings 
that  may  live  distinct  from  and  even  apart  from  the  body. 
Ordinary  dreams  would  be  able  to  give  the  notion  of  spirits, 
while  dreams  of  the  dead  would  lead  to  the  belief  in  the 
spirit's  survival  of  the  death  of  the  body.  The  doctrine 
that  traces  all  religious  belief  back  to  the  belief  in  spirits, 
which  had  its  origin  in  dreams  and  in  ghostly  apparitions, 
is  called  animism.  It  is  held  in  common  by  men  like 
Tylor,  Spencer,  Huxley  and  Grant  Allen.  But  on  the 
question  of  ancestor  worship,  only  Mr.  Spencer  and  Grant 
Allen,  perhaps,  are  perfectly  certain  that  all  religion 
began  with  the  worship  of  ancestors.     Other  members  of 


436  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  school,  like  Tylor,  while  sure  of  animism,  are  willing 
to  admit  that  primitive  deities  may  enter  through  other 
doors  than  those  of  ancestral  dreams. 

If  we  admit  that  the  primitive  man  attains  his  first 
notion  of  spirits  in  this  way  and  also  the  first  motives  for 
gradually  deifying  some  of  these  spirits,  we  shall  have  him 
brought,  through  such  experiences,  into  possession,  not 
only  of  the  notion  of  spirits,  but  also  of  the  distinction 
between  deities  and  spirits  like  his  own  that  never  arrive 
at  the  dignity  of  deification.  In  short,  he  will  find  himself 
in  possession  of  the  germs  of  both  a  psychological  theory  of 
souls  and  a  theological  theory  of  the  god  or  gods  which  he 
is  led  to  worship.  From  this  point  of  view  it  is  easy  to  see 
how  the  stream  of  spiritism  might  develop  along  two  lines 
that  at  the  same  time  would  be  constantly  intermingling; 
sometimes  stimulating  each  other's  growth,  but  more  often 
acting  as  antagonizing  or  corrupting  forces.  One  of  these 
lines  would  be  the  distinctively  religious  and  would  include 
the  movements  by  which  the  spirits  that  were  to  become 
deities  would  be  selected  out  of  the  common  herd  of  spirits 
and  elevated  to  the  divine  dignity  of  the  gods  of  the  differ- 
ent tribes  and  nations.  The  other  line  would  be  human- 
istic or  quasi-humanistic,  and  would  concern  the  fate  of  the 
other  spirits  who  were  not  fortunate  enough  to  be  chosen 
as  deities.  For  the  theology  of  animism  is  only  part  of 
its  significance.  It  includes  both  a  theology  and  an  an- 
thropology, and  its  anthropology  is  perhaps  its  richer  part, 
inasmuch  as  out  of  it  develops  man's  ideas  of  his  own  soul 
and  of  its  destinies  and  the  duration  of  its  life.  To  the 
anthropological  part  also  belongs  without  doubt  a  large 
part  of  the  history  of  fetichism  and  totemism;  the  former 
providing  employment  for  wandering  spirits  to  which  no  par- 
ticular body  had  been  assigned  until  they  were  imprisoned 
in  the  particular  fetich-symbol  which  might  be  a  snake  or  a 
piece  of  wood,  and  assigning  to  them  a  function  in  the  lives 
of  individuals ;  the  latter,  totemism,  attaching  to  beings  that 
were  family-spirits  in  their  origin  but  gradually  grew  to 


chap.v.  ORIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  437 

tribal  proportions  and  became  the  arbiters  of  the  tribal 
divisions  of  land  and  of  civic  law  and  order  in  general.  It 
is  clear,  I  think,  that  while  Mr.  Spencer  may  find  his 
dream-ancestor  theory  weak  in  the  presence  of  such  a 
development  as  fetichism,  it  is  on  its  native  heath  when 
totemism  is  under  consideration.  But  both  fetichism  and 
totemism  belong  more  to  the  anthropology  of  animism  than 
to  its  theology,  though  the  two  theories  intermix,  and  the 
totem,  while  it  always  possesses  social  and  civic  sanctity 
as  the  symbol  of  law  and  order,  yet  only  sometimes  has  a 
distinctively  theological  significance  as  a  symbol  of  the 
deity.  The  totem  may  or  may  not  symbolize  the  god  or 
gods  of  the  tribes.  The  fetich,  on  the  other  hand,  while 
it  is  commonly  an  object  of  more  or  less  superstitious  re- 
gard, is  more  often  without  theological  significance  than 
with  it,  for  it  is  the  exceptional  fetich  that  is  regarded 
as  a  god. 

Now  if  we  combine  the  theology  and  the  anthropology 
of  the  primitive  man,  we  shall  have  a  full  vision  of  the  rich 
heritage  to  which  he  has  fallen  heir.  Starting  without  any 
spiritual  possessions,  his  dreams  and  ghostly  visions  have 
supplied  him  with  the  germs  of  both  a  theology  and  an 
anthropology.  He  dreams  himself  into  the  belief  in  spirits, 
his  own  included.  Some  of  his  dreams  give  him  the  hint  of 
free  spirits,  that  is,  of  spirits  living  apart  from  these 
bodies.  Ghostly  visions  confirm  this  with  the  apparition 
of  spirits  that  are  not  associated  with  any  particular 
bodies.  Spirit  thus  becomes  emancipated  and  takes  its 
place  in  the  savage's  system  of  reality.  But  he  has  had 
dreams  of  his  dead  ancestor  and  these  are  strengthened  by 
the  waking  vision  of  the  ancestral  ghost.  Here  his  experi- 
ence supplies  him  with  the  principle  of  selection  in  the 
spiritual  world.  For  the  ancestral  spirits  tend  to  develop 
into  deities  and  thus  to  fill  up  the  pantheon  of  his  the- 
ology, while  on  the  other  hand  to  these  spirits  that  are  not 
elected  to  divinity,  other  lesser,  though  honorable  func- 
tions are  assigned.     Some  of  them  become  devils  and  are 


438  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

respected  scarcely  loss  than  the  gods  themselves,  but  the 
rank  and  file  have  to  content  themselves  with  subordinate 
positions.  They  become  sub-deities,  never  rising  to  the 
cardinal  dignity;  or  they  just  remain  finite  spirits  ready 
to  undertake  any  office  that  may  be  open  to  them.  That 
is  probably  the  reason  why  so  many  of  them  become 
fetiches,  though  even  in  the  case  of  the  fetich  it  is  said  that 
it  is  possible  sometimes  to  have  an  honorable  ancestry.  The 
better  class  of  spirits  will,  of  course,  prefer  to  become 
totems,  for  this  involves  social  and  political  dignity  and  a 
totem  might  even  rank  in  some  instances  as  a  sub-deity. 

We  have  pointed  out  that  the  animistic  belief  of  the 
savage  has  both  a  theological  and  an  anthropological  sec- 
tion. But  the  savage  does  not  succeed  very  well  in  keeping 
things  distinct.  His  religion  is  a  thing  that  includes  them 
both;  and  many  things  that  are  not  theological  at  all,  but 
purely  anthropological,  have  acquired  religious  sacredness 
and  have  a  religious  sanction  attached  to  them.  Moreover, 
the  god  of  the  tribe  is  apt  to  be  a  jealous  deity  and  to  be 
especially  jealous  of  his  prerogatives.  His  disposition  will 
be  to  concern  himself  with  pretty  much  all  the  details  of 
the  life  of  the  individuals  and  the  tribe  of  which  he  is 
tutelar.  The  taboo  will  thus  arise  and  many  things,  in 
fact  most  things,  will  in  some  way  or  in  some  aspect  of 
their  use,  have  the  injunction  of  the  local  deity  placed 
upon  them.  An  important  part  of  the  savage's  education 
will  consist,  therefore,  in  determining  what  is  taboo  and 
what  is  not.  The  principle  of  taboo,  which  is  simply  that 
of  setting  apart  for  sacred  use,  and  has  nothing  distinct- 
ively ethical  in  it,  will  be  universal,  and  through  it  the 
mantle  of  religion  will  gradually  be  extended  over  all  the 
affairs  of  life.  The  savage's  world  thus  becomes  peopled 
with  spirits,  and  the  savage  comes  to  regard  himself  as  in 
a  world  of  spirits  in  which  the  fundamental  line  of  cleavage 
takes  place  between  himself  and  his  associates,  the  men  of 
his  own  tribe  or  nation,  on  the  one  hand,  and  on  the  other 
the  whole  multitude  of  free  spirits,  deities,  sub-deities  and 


chap.  v.  OEIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  439 

finite  spirits  which  are  related  in  various  ways  to  his  life 
and  vitally  influence  all  its  issues.  His  religion,  as  we 
have  seen,  includes  both  his  theology  and  his  anthropology, 
and  these  rest  at  the  basis  of  his  personal,  social  and  po- 
litical life  and  institutions. 

But  within  this  complex,  which  arises  on  both  sides  of 
this  line  of  cleavage  as  we  have  indicated,  and  which  sets 
man  himself  over  against  the  spiritual  forces  of  the  world, 
would  spring  the  sottriohxjical  problem  of  the  savage,  the 
problem  of  his  own  spiritual  well-being  and  the  means  by 
which  it  is  to  be  secured.  The  savage  might  not  have  a  very 
profound  conviction  of  sin,  but  he  would  feel  his  own  help- 
lessness and  the  necessity  of  working  out  some  modus  vivcndi 
in  his  relations  with  the  spiritual  world.  His  animism,  which 
we  have  seen  to  be  spiritism,  would  prompt  him  in  this  direc- 
tion from  even  a  deeper  motive  than  that  of  safety.  The 
same  forces  that  lead  him  to  people  his  world  with  spirits  in 
general  would  lead  him  to  a  belief  in  his  own  spirit  and  to 
entertain  certain  aspirations  as  to  its  life  and  destiny.  He 
would  not  realize  the  universality  of  death  as  does  the  civi- 
lized man  and  would  be  disposed  to  regard  it  as  a  kind  of 
penalty  that  may  be  remitted.  He  is,  however,  in  the  habit 
of  seeing  people  die  and  yet  has  learned  to  distinguish  be- 
tween the  soul  and  the  body  and  to  believe  in  the  power  of 
the  soul  to  exist  apart  from  the  body.  Death  is  a  possibility, 
—nay  perhaps  a  common  fate,— which  only  the  gods  can  re- 
mit if  they  will.  This  conviction  of  a  separate  life  of  the 
soul  leads  the  savage  to  various  degrees  of  belief  regarding 
the  future  world  and  the  continued  existence  of  the  soul,  the 
history  of  which  constitutes  the  natural  history  of  the 
belief  in  immortality.  This  belief  so  far  as  it  exists,  — and 
it  is  said  not  to  be  quite  universal  among  savage  peoples,— 
would,  in  connection  with  the  interests  of  the  present  life, 
form  the  basis  of  the  sot&riology  of  the  primitive  savage. 
He  would  desire  the  well-being  of  his  own  life,  temporal  and 
eternal,  material  and  spiritual,  as  well  as  that  of  his 
friends.     But  in  order  to  secure  this  he  would  have  to  take 


440  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

account  of  the  gods  and  the  devils,  if  there  were  any  in  his 
creed,  and  of  the  other  spirits  which  have  power  to  do  him 
good  or  harm.  There  would  arise,  then,  that  elaborate 
ritual  with  its  priesthood  and  priestly  observances,  the 
sense  of  the  need  of  propitiation  and  the  sacrifices  and  other 
means  of  effecting  it.  In  relation  to  the  inferior  class  of 
spirits,  inhabiting  fetiches  and  totems  or  perhaps  without 
fixed  habitation,  superstition  would  constitute  its  resources 
in  charms,  spells  and  incantations.  The  whole  ritual, 
whether  it  concerned  the  recovery  of  a  lost  treasure  or  the 
soul's  repose  in  the  future  world,  would  have  a  bearing  on 
the  general  problem  of  soteriology  and  would  be  included 
in  the  savage's  religion. 

From  another  point  of  view,  on  the  question  of  the  place 
of  polytheistic  and  monotheistic  conceptions  in  the  develop- 
ment of  religious  ideas  and  beliefs,  the  general  consensus 
of  the  anthropological  school  may  be  stated  about  as  fol- 
lows. The  primary  stage  of  religious  development  could 
not  strictly  be  called  either  monotheistic  or  polytheistic, 
since  each  tribe  worships  its  own  god  or  gods  without  con- 
sidering the  question  whether  there  be  in  fact  one  or  a 
plurality  of  deities.  Max  Miiller  thinks  that  this  stage 
may  be  characterized  as  henotheistic,  but  he  is  somewhat 
of  an  outsider  and  his  proposition  is  not  taken  very  seri- 
ously. On  the  whole,  the  disposition  of  the  school  is  to 
leave  this  earliest  period  without  definite  characterization. 
The  first  definable  stage  of  belief,  however,  is  polytheistic. 
On  this  point  current  anthropology  is  sure.  Men  believed 
in  a  plurality  of  gods  before  they  believed  in  one  god. 
They  were  able  to  conceive  many  deities  and  the  world 
as  being  ruled  by  many  deities  before  they  were  able  to 
conceive  it  as  under  the  rule  of  one  deity.  The  method  of 
reaching  monotheism  as  held  from  Hume  down  to  Huxley 
is  one  of  selection  and  promotion.  It  ordinarily  accom- 
panies an  advance  in  the  complexity  of  political  organiza- 
tion where  several  tribes  or  nations  are  joined  into  one. 
Either  the  gods  of  all  are  served  severally  or  collectively, 


chap.  v.  OKIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  441 

or,  the  god  of  some  favored  tribe  is  chosen,  and  becomes 
the  god  of  the  whole  nation,  while  the  others  are  neglected 
and  their  worship  dies  out.  Thus  monotheism  as  an  ethnic 
movement  arises,  as  among  the  Hebrews.  But  only  specu- 
lative philosophy  is  able  to  complete  the  monotheistic  con- 
ception in  the  idea  of  one  absolute  being  as  the  ground  of 
all  reality. 

From  still  a  third  point  of  view  the  anthropological 
theory  develops  a  positive  doctrine.  The  ethical  element 
in  religion  is  a  late  arrival.  Huxley  is  so  sure  of  this 
that  he  confidently  denies  the  ethical  element  in  early 
Judaism.  It  is,  in  his  opinion,  a  system  of  animistic  belief 
founded  on  ancestral  worship  and  made  up  mainly  of  the 
unethical  notions  of  propitiation  and  sacrifice.  Even 
Jehovah  was  not  at  first  a  god  of  righteousness,  but  wTas 
an  original  tribal  deity  which  Moses,  appropriating  the 
religious  ideas  of  Egypt,  freed  from  tribal  restrictions  and 
elevated  into  the  God  of  righteousness  of  the  later  scrip- 
tures. If  this  be  the  case  with  the  Hebrews,  whose  religion 
may  be  distinctively  characterized  as  ethical  monotheism, 
then  much  more  clearly  is  it  true  of  all  less  ethical  religions. 
Whatever  place  ethics  holds  in  them  now,  they  were 
originally  unethical  and  acquired  their  ethical  content  at  a 
comparatively  late  stage  of  their  evolution.  This,  of 
course,  is  what  a  partisan  of  the  animistic  creed  would 
naturally  expect,  and  the  whole  theory  of  religion,  as  well 
as  of  its  development,  depends  in  an  important  sense  on 
what  one  thinks  of  animism.  If  animism  embodies  the  whole 
concept  of  religion,  then  the  very  method  of  its  origin  seems 
to  remove  it  from  any  very  vital  contact  with  the  ethical  and 
puts  its  origin  in  a  field  of  experience  that  is  particularly 
open  on  the  one  hand  to  illusion  and  on  the  other  to  immoral 
superstition.  If  this  be  true,  the  earliest  religions  would  be 
the  lowest  morally,  and  what  might  more  naturally  be  re- 
garded as  a  degeneration  from  any  point  of  view  other  than 
this,  would  be  regarded  as  a  case  of  extreme  antiquity  and 
undevelopment.     The  course  of  religious  evolution  is  there- 


442  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

fore,  in  the  first  place,  from  the  non-religious  to  the  re- 
ligious; in  the  second  place,  from  mere  indeterminateness, 
through  polytheism  by  promotion  and  selection  to  ethnic 
and  finally  to  abstract  monotheism;  and  thirdly,  from  a 
non-ethical  and  in  some  respects  immoral  spiritism  to  a 
deity  that  is  more  or  less  adequately  conceived  as  the  God 
of  righteousness. 

In  the  foregoing  sketch  we  have  endeavored  to  give  in 
broad  outline  the  main  lineaments  of  what  may  be  called 
the  current  anthropological  theory  of  the  origin  and  growth 
of  religion.  Now,  there  are  two  methods  of  criticism,  one 
of  which  would  be  to  point  out  in  detail  what,  from  our 
point  of  view,  seem  to  be  the  most  serious  defects  of  this 
theory;  while  the  other,  which  we  propose  to  follow  here, 
consists  in  sketching  the  outlines  of  a  view  that  we  should 
deem  adequate  to  satisfy  all  the  legitimate  requirements  of 
a  theory  of  origin.  In  the  first  place,  then,  in  order  to  reach 
a  conclusion  regarding  the  origin  of  religion,  it  would  be 
necessary  to  acquaint  oneself  not  only  with  the  facts  of 
religious  experience  as  they  have  embodied  themselves 
objectively  in  the  religious  life  of  peoples,  but  also  to  make 
a  careful  and  conscientious  study  of  the  roots  of  religion 
in  the  human  consciousness.  For  it  is  inevitable  that  the 
subjective  nature  of  man  will  be  the  major  factor  in  the 
problem  and  that  a  psychological  investigation  of  the  re- 
ligious consciousness  will  be  all-important.  Again,  in 
determining  the  origin  of  religion  whose  object  is  always 
in  some  sense  transcendent  and  superordinary,  the  psy- 
chological question  ought  to  be  considered  as  to  whether 
man's  consciousness  betrays  any  evidence  of  possessing 
any  superordinary  organs  or  channels  through  which 
unusual  knowledge  may  be  acquired.  At  any  rate,  in  con- 
sidering the  question  of  the  origin  of  a  belief  in  the  super- 
ordinary,  the  possibility  of  the  existence  of  superordinary 
means  of  information  must  not  be  excluded,  unless  we  are 
prepared  to  beg  the  question  at  the  outset  by  assuming  that 
the  belief  whose  history  we  are  tracing  is  spurious.     Tak- 


chap.  v.  ORIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  443 

ing  the  three  alternatives  possible  here,  (1)  that  the  belief 
is  spurious,  (2)  that  it  is  genuine,  (3)  that  the  genuineness 
or  spuriousness  of  the  belief  is  not  to  enter  as  a  presump- 
tion into  the  investigation,  it  is  clear  that  the  third  atti- 
tude which  best  comports  with  the  spirit  of  pure  science 
could  not  exclude  the  alternative  of  possible  superordinary 
means  of  reaching  truth.  Moreover,  we  have  taken  the 
ground,— and  here  we  have  the  analogy  of  the  best  known 
movements  in  history  in  our  favor,— that  religion  would 
probably  originate,  not  as  the  outcome  of  some  gradual 
process  like  the  Lamarckian's  use  and  disuse,  but  rather  as 
a  unique  variation  and  as  one  that  would  be  such  by  virtue 
of  its  new  religious  character.  We  have  maintained  that 
this  is  probable  and  that  the  variation  would  likely  embody 
itself  in  a  genius,  or  group  of  geniuses,  rather  than  in  ordi- 
nary individuals,  and  in  this  we  have  the  support  not  only 
of  history  but  of  genetic  psychology.  "Why  should  not  the 
first  proto-human  that  became  religious  have  been  a  genius 
rather  than  an  ordinary  member  of  his  tribe  or  race?  The 
answer  to  this  might  be  that  in  such  a  case  the  genius 
himself  would  become  the  god.  But  history  is  full  of 
instances  of  prophets  and  seers  who  did  not  become  gods. 
In  fact,  the  ordinary  function  of  the  prophet  is  to  direct 
men's  attention  away  from  himself  to  a  transcendent 
deity,  whom  he  represents.  Thus  again,  to  our  '  why  not  ? ', 
may  be  answered,  'But  why  so?  Is  not  your  alternative  a 
mere  conjecture?'  But  such  tilting  is  profitless.  We 
have  pointed  out  a  possible  mode  of  origin  that  has  many 
recognized  analogies  in  its  favor  and  that  is  contradicted 
by  no  evidence  that  the  anthropologists  can  find  in  the  life 
of  known  savages.  Furthermore,  as  to  the  primitive,  pre- 
religious  man  with  whom  the  anthropologist  is  dealing,  he 
is  a  being  who  must  be  constructed  largely  by  hypothesis; 
and  we  have  shown  at  least  one  respect  in  which  the  hy- 
pothetical method  has  been  faultily  applied.  We  have 
claimed  that  in  order  to  reach  the  primitive,  pre-religious 
man,  we  must,  going  down  the  evolution  scale,  strip  off  not 


444  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

simply  all  his  religious  experience,  but  also  all  the  general 
development  that  has  accompanied  it.  The  result  will  be 
not  a  pre-religious  savage  with  his  other  possessions  intact, 
but  a  being  who  has  not  yet  begun  to  reflect  or  to  form 
abstract  conceptions.  The  problem  of  the  origin  of  religion 
will  then  be  that  of  the  appearance  of  a  gifted  proto-human 
who  will  break  through  the  crust  of  spontaneity  into  the 
reflecting,  the  thinking,  stage  of  existence. 

Let  us,  then,  attempt  to  sketch  a  theory  of  origin  that 
will  avail  itself  of  all  the  legitimate  resources  of  psy- 
chology as  well  as  of  general  anthropology.  Placing  our- 
selves in  imagination  back  at  the  point  where  the  primitive 
man  is  yet  pre-religious,  if  we  make  the  necessary  deduc- 
tions from  present  savage  intelligence,  we  find  that  point 
below  the  level  of  reflection  and  abstract  ideas  in  the  stage 
where  the  conscious  functions  are  all  spontaneous  and  con- 
crete and  where,  in  fact,  our  primitive  savage  has  not  as 
yet  become  a  man.  He  is  a  proto-human;  no  doubt  the 
most  gifted  of  the  animals,  but  as  yet,  except  to  the  eye  of 
prophecy,  an  animal.  In  this  stage  he  will  no  doubt  have 
achieved  the  germs  of  sociality  and  of  the  tribal  life,  so 
that  the  less  gifted  will  be  under  the  tutelage  and  leader- 
ship of  the  more  gifted  members  of  the  community.  Let 
us  suppose,  then,  as  would  sometime  be  likely  to  be  the  case, 
that  in  one  of  these  tribes  some  individual  is  much  more 
gifted  than  his  fellows,  so  that  like  Saul,  son  of  Kish,  he 
stands  head  and  shoulders  above  them  all.  He  is  a  genius 
in  fact.  Now  let  us  suppose,  which  is  psychologically 
probable,  that  his  genius  takes  the  form  of  attention  and 
that  he  achieves  a  greater  rapport  with  objective  phe- 
nomena than  his  fellows  are  capable  of.  We  have  here 
the  conditions  of  such  an  unusual  experience  as  we  have  al- 
ready depicted.  Through  the  rapport  arising  out  of  the 
unusual  gift  of  attention,  the  occurrence  of  some  extraor- 
dinary natural  phenomenon,  like  an  electrical  storm  or 
an  eclipse  of  the  sun  at  noonday,  would  throw  him  notably 
out  of  his  spontaneous  balance,  first  upon  the  object  itself, 


chap.  v.  OEIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  445 

and  then  back  upon  himself.  The  objective  consciousness 
would  hold  in  it  the  germ  of  religion,  for  it  would  be  his 
first  mental  grasp  of  a  transcendent  object  while  the  sub- 
jective consciousness  would  give  him  his  first  revelation  of 
self.  Self -consciousness  and  the  objective  consciousness 
of  religion  would  thus  originate  in  the  same  process,  though 
in  this  process  the  objective  religious  factor  would  take  the 
initiative. 

If,  now,  we  revert  to  the  roots  of  religion  which  we  have 
discovered  in  the  human  consciousness,  we  shall  find  the  data 
that  will  enable  us  to  construct  a  history  of  the  probable 
evolution  of  the  fundamental  ideas  of  religion  in  the  mind 
of  this  gifted  savage.  These  fundamental  ideas  will  be 
those  of  God  and  of  himself  and  his  own  soul.  In  the  first 
place,  we  have  seen  how  the  root  of  transcendence,  as  we 
have  called  it  (man's  sense  of  the  presence  of  that 
which  greatly  surpasses  his  own  power)  would  lead  him 
to  ascribe  the  extraordinary  phenomenon  to  some  tran- 
scendent being  or  power,  and  we  can  anticipate  how 
the  operation  of  the  self-analogy,  the  tendency  to  con- 
ceive objective  being  after  the  type  of  himself)  would 
operate  reflexively  in  determining  him  to  define  his  tran- 
scendent object  after  some  vague  analogies  of  the  self. 
AVe  must  bear  in  mind,  however,  that  his  knowledge  of 
self  is  as  yet  in  its  germ  and  that  above  all  he  has  not 
arrived  at  the  notion  of  spirit  in  the  technical  sense. 
His  idea  of  self  will  be  somewhat  shadowy,  therefore,  and 
in  consequence  the  being  whom  he  characterizes  will  be 
one  that  is  transcendent  and  at  the  same  time  somewhat 
vaguely  analogous  to  himself.  This  being  will  represent 
the  deity  of  the  first  gifted  savage  who  becomes  the  bearer 
of  a  religious  consciousness.  Now,  there  are  other  roots  of 
religion  that  will  be  able,  I  think,  to  give  us  some  insight 
here.  These  are  the  social,  ethical  and  the  aesthetic. 
"When  the  gifted  savage  has  achieved  the  consciousness  of 
religion,  he  finds  that  he  has  also  acquired  a  new  organ  of 
general   application,— the   power   of   reflection,— and   this 


446  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

organ  acts  by  relating  him  to  the  objects  of  the  world  that 
surrounds  him.  The  most  interesting  of  these  is  the  new 
transcendent  being  that  holds  the  center  of  his  religion. 
But  scarcely  less  interesting  will  be  his  fellow  beings  whom 
he  will  now  recognize  not  only  as  beings  but  as  beings  of 
his  own  kind.  In  short,  he  will  have  discovered  a  new  bond 
of  sociality.  He  will  begin  to  regard  his  fellow  tribesmen 
as  his  social  others,  and  this  as  we  have  seen  in  our  study 
of  sociology  will  lead  not  only  to  ordinary  forms  of  social 
reaction,  but  also  to  the  specially  reflective  form  that  is 
called  ethical.  He  will  begin  to  develop  out  of  these  rela- 
tions the  germs  of  a  moral  order,— an  order  of  duty  and 
righteousness  as  well  as  one  of  sympathy  and  love.  Nor- 
mally, however,  the  most  impressive  side  of  morality  is  that 
which  embodies  itself  in  the  ideas  of  law  and  righteousness. 
Our  gifted  savage  will  also  begin  to  develop  on  the  cogni- 
tive side,  and  his  religious  consciousness  will  not  lack  an 
intellectual  content.  But  no  one  will  dispute  the  proposi- 
tion, I  think,  that  his  dominant  reactions  will  be  in  the 
sphere  of  conduct  rather  than  in  that  of  knowledge.  And 
in  the  field  of  conduct  his  dominant  reactions  will  be  of  the 
socio-ethical  type.  Bearing  in  mind,  then,  that  self- 
analogy  is  the  principle  of  characterization  in  the  sphere 
of  religious  ideas,  it  is  reasonable  for  us  to  expect  that 
the  first  definite  characterization  of  the  deity  will  be  the 
clothing  of  him  with  socio-ethical  attributes.  What,  then, 
are  the  principal  of  these?  In  the  first  place,  the  deity, 
being  transcendent,  would  naturally  be  clothed  with  the 
highest  social  relationship  known  to  this  gifted  savage, 
whether  this  be  fatherhood,  or  chiefhood,  or  perhaps 
both  combined.  The  deity  would  be  the  chief  or  supreme 
ruler.  And  as  such  he  would  naturally  become  the  su- 
preme bearer  of  the  ethical  attributes.  His  will  be- 
comes the  savage's  source  and  standard  of  obligation. 
The  aesthetic  root  of  religion  will  enter  here  as  relat- 
ing the  object  of  religion  to  the  springs  of  emotion  and 


chap.  v.  OEIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  447 

also  as  tending  to  the  development  of  religious  sentiments 
and  ideals. 

Now,  what  is  claimed  here  is  that  all  this  in  its  rudi- 
ments (for  we  are  not  supposing  anything  to  be  completely 
developed)  will  belong  to  the  first  chapter  of  religious  his- 
tory. The  genius  in  whom  the  unique  variation  we  are  consid- 
ering becomes  embodied,  will  no  doubt  be  the  instrument  of 
the  advance  of  his  tribe  to  the  plane  on  which  this  variation 
will  be  adopted  and  become  tribal  as  well  as  individual. 
But  this,  though  the  first  chapter,  is  not  the  whole  and 
perhaps  not  quite  exhaustive  even  of  the  first  chapter. 
We  may  be  sure  that  the  development  which  results  in  the 
religious  variation  becoming  the  possession  of  the  com- 
munity, will  be  marked  by  advance  on  both  the  theological 
and  the  anthropological  sides  of  religion.  While  the  savage 
is  determining  his  socio-ethical  relations  and,  by  the  analogy 
of  these,  further  characterizing  the  god  of  his  worship,  he 
will  also  be  determining  various  things  of  value  about  him- 
self and  his  social  fellows.  We  may  characterize  this 
whole  anthropological  side  as  the  development  of  the  idea 
of  spirits  with  the  accompanying  belief  in  their  existence, 
and  the  double  influence  they  tend  to  exert  on  religious 
ideas.  It  is  here  in  connection  with  this  problem,  that  the 
anthropological  theory  attains  its  maximum  value.  We 
might  expect  that  a  theory  which  reduces  the  whole  story 
of  religion  to  that  of  spiritism  would  have  something 
valuable  to  say  when  the  special  problem  is  that  of  the 
origin  of  the  idea  of  spirits  and  of  belief  in  their  existence. 
In  tracing  this  chapter  of  religious  experience,  however,  we 
ought  not  to  forget  that  the  normal  waking  experience  of  a 
being  that  has  achieved  the  germs  of  reflection  may  be  a 
factor.  We  say  this  in  view  of  the  tendency  to  ascribe  the 
whole  result  to  a  sleeping  or  hypnotic,  rather  than  to  a 
normally  waking,  consciousness.  However,  as  it  is  a  varia- 
tion, which  marks  progress  beyond  the  ordinary  level  of  the 
normal  waking  consciousness,  that  we  are  seeking  to  account 
for,  the  tendency  is  probably  not  wholly  misleading.    We  are 


448  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

prepared  at  least  to  accept  in  the  main  what  the  anthropolo- 
gists have  to  tell  us  about  the  development  of  the  savage's 
ideas  and  beliefs  in  the  field  of  spirits,  as  true  if  not  the 
whole  truth.  But  the  immediate  root  of  which  this  develop- 
\  ment  is  a  stem  is  a  reflection  on  self  rather  than  a  reflection 
on  the  nature  of  the  gods.  There  is  an  anthropological 
as  well  as  a  theological  content  in  religion. 

Now,  man 's  reflection  on  himself  would  no  doubt  at  first 
derive  its  most  important  data  and  its  most  vital  stimuli 
from  dreams  in  which  he  finds  himself  or  some  friend,  or 
some  dead  ancestor,  envisaged  as  living  apart  from  his  body. 
By  the  principle  of  dissociation  he  would  gradually  detach 
the  notion  of  the  phantom  from  that  of  the  body,  and  in  case 
of  the  dead,  the  existence  of  the  phantom  from  the  existence 
of  the  body.  His  idea  of  spirits  as  capable  of  existing  free 
from  the  body  and  of  surviving  the  death  of  the  body, 
would  thus  be  developed.  This  result,  which  would  at 
first  be  local,  confined  to  friends,  relatives,  or  at  least, 
members  of  his  tribe,  would  be  extended  by  various  means. 
One  of  the  most  important  of  these  would  no  doubt  be  the 
ghostly  apparition ;  that  of  the  phantom  spirit  dissociated 
from  any  particular  kind  of  a  body  and  freely  inhabiting 
space.  We  must  bear  in  mind  that  the  direct  root  of  this 
is  reflection  on  self ;  and  this  reveals  the  fact  that  the  savage 
finds  the  type  of  all  this  spirit-defining  in  the  form  of 
existence  revealed  in  his  own  self-consciousness.  Spirits 
are  selves  freed  from  the  restraints  of  the  oody  and  con- 
ceived as  living  a  life  of  their  own.  When  once  the  savage 's 
spiritism  has  freed  itself  from  bodily  trammels  his  imagina- 
tion is  left  without  restraint,  and  he  may  people  the  whole 
universe  with  spiritual  beings.  This  is  where  his  objective 
anthropomorphism  comes  in  and  leads  him  to  create  his 
worlds  of  mythology  and  fancy.  These  are  not  products 
of  the  immediate  application  of  the  self-analogy  such  as  we 
find  in  the  first  stage  of  religion  before  the  notion  of  spirit 
has  been  formed.  They  are  the  direct  product  of  spiritism 
itself,  supplying,  as  it  does,  the  concept  of  beings  that  are 


chap.  v.  ORIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  449 

believed  to  exist  in  great  numbers  and  that  are  definitely 
conceivable.  The  period  in  religious  development,  then,  in 
which  the  tendency  is  to  refer  everything  to  the  agency  of 
personal  spirits  is  thus  a  second  stage,  and  it  is  not  directly 
a  theological,  but  rather  an  anthropological  development 
founded  on  self-reflection. 

But  since  the  theological  and  the  anthropological 
branches  do  not  unfold  independently,  we  ought  to  be  pre- 
pared to  find  spiritism  tending  to  exert  two  lines  of 
influence.  In  the  first  place  it  will  tend  to  influence  theo- 
logical conceptions  by  applying  spiritual  analogies  to  the 
objects  of  religious  worship.  Returning,  now,  to  the  gifted 
savage,  the  development  of  the  belief  in  spirits  will  lead 
to  further  characterizations  of  his  deity.  His  deity  will 
not  only  be  a  god  of  righteousness ;  he  will  now  be  a 
spirit  and  will  be  conceived  as  living  the  emancipated 
life  of  a  spirit,  and  not  as  bound  to  some  particular  element 
as  ocean,  earth,  or  sky.  No  doubt  it  has  been  the  develop- 
ment of  spiritism  that  has  led  to  the  spiritualization  of 
theology.  But  spiritism  itself  is  of  anthropological  and 
not  of  theological  extraction.  The  second  line  in  the  develop- 
ment of  spiritism  is  the  most  characteristic  and  consists  in 
the  employment  of  spirits  to  perform  religious  and  quasi- 
religious  functions.  We  have  thus  the  rise  of  fetichism, 
ghost-worship,  totemism  and  other  forms  of  animism, 
connected  with  which  are  some  of  the  most  superstitious 
and  degrading  features  of  savage  religion.  We  have  said 
that  this  development  is  anthropological  rather  than  theo- 
logical, so  that  animism,  or  as  we  have  preferred  to  call  it, 
spiritism,  while  it  represents  a  line  of  religious  develop- 
ment does  not  perhaps  embody  the  most  vital  trunk  of 
religion,  which  is  theological  and  directly  concerned  with 
the  development  of  man's  ideas  and  beliefs  regarding  the 
deity.  We  have  seen,  however,  that  spiritism  has  vitally 
affected  man's  ideas  and  beliefs  regarding  the  deity  and 
we  have  not  even  yet  learned  the  whole  chapter.  We  have 
seen  how  Mr.  Spencer  is  led  to  take  the  ground  that  all  the 
29 


450  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

deities  have  been  derived  from  ancestral  types.  This  has 
been  refuted,  but  it  contains  a  truth  of  importance.  The 
ancestral  analogy  would  no  doubt  become  a  favorite  one  in 
religion  and  the  tendency  would  be,  as  spiritism  developed, 
to  apply  the  analogy  where  it  had  not  before  been  used  and 
to  regard  the  supreme  deity  as  also  the  divine  father  of 
the  tribe  or  the  nation.  I  apprehend  that  Mr.  Spencer  has 
been  misled  by  an  appearance.  In  some  instances  the  an- 
cestor-analogy may  have  been  seized  on  by  the  founder  of 
a  first  religion;  but  in  most  cases  it  is  more  probable  that 
the  use  of  the  analogy  has  been  the  result  of  an  after- 
thought. 

Another  influence  which  spiritism  would  exert  in  the 
religious  field  would  be  of  a  less  beneficent  kind.  It  would 
tend  to  antagonize  the  worship  of  the  primary  deity  and  to 
substitute  some  form  of  spirit-worship  in  its  place.  Now 
it  is  a  fact  of  history  that  spiritism  or  animism  has  been 
relatively  unethical.  This  has  no  doubt  been  due  in  part 
to  the  mode  of  its  origin.  If  the  anthropologists  be  right 
about  it,— and  we  doubt  not  that  they  are  in  the  main,— then 
we  have  presented  in  the  method  by  which  spirits  gradually 
emancipated  themselves  and  became  free  citizens  of  space, 
the  method  also  by  which  they  have  been  freed  from  ethical 
restrictions.  It  is  not  so  much  by  virtue  of  his  deity  that 
Zeus,  for  example,  is  able  to  carry  on  his  amours,  as  it  is 
by  virtue  of  his  emancipation  as  a  spirit  from  ethical 
restrictions  which  makes  it  possible  for  him  to  assume  all 
sorts  of  disguises.  We  find  also  in  other  cases  of  evil 
passions  and  propensities  that  are  ascribed  to  the  deities  of 
different  nations,  that  these  characterize  them  rather  as 
spirits  emancipated,  from  normal  restriction  than  as  deities. 
Thus  Jehovah  himself,  during  part  of  the  period  in  which 
the  Hebrews  were  most  exposed  to  the  influence  of  animism, 
came  to  be  represented  frequently  not  as  a  God  of  right- 
eousness, but  as  a  revengeful  and  unscrupulous  tyrant.  We 
here  see  the  influence  of  animism  corrupting  the  purer 
theological  stream.     Against   this  tendency,  however,   the 


chap.  v.  OBIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  451 

prophets,  who  represent  the  purer  theological  tradition, 
constantly  protested,  and  it  is  to  them  that  Judaism  owes 
its  survival  as  a  pure  rather  than  as  a  mixed  and  degraded 
form  of  religion. 

In  the  above  sketch  we  have  endeavored  to  show  how,  if 
religion  originated  as  we  have  supposed  that  it  did,  the 
various  religious  tendencies  which  have  displayed  them- 
selves on  the  page  of  history  could  or  would  naturally 
arise  under  it.  We  have  found  reason  for  denying  that 
animism  or  spiritism  presents  us  a  first  chapter  in  the 
history  of  religion,  or  that  its  exclusive  claims  can  be  main- 
tained; but  we  have  found  that  it  represents  the  anthro- 
pological side  of  religious  history  as  distinguished  from  its 
theological  side,  and  that  it  has  exerted  a  vital  influence  on 
the  theological  development  itself,  some  of  this  being  essen- 
tial and  beneficent,  while  much  of  it,  owing  to  its  unethical 
character,  has  been  pernicious,  leading  to  the  corrupting 
of  an  otherwise  relatively  pure  stream.  The  ethical  ele- 
ment in  early  religion,  as  we  claim,  has  been  mainly  con- 
served by  the  theological  rather  than  the  anthropological 
influence.  For  we  have  seen  how  on  the  hypothesis  of 
origin  which  we  have  presented,  the  pre-animistic  conditions 
would  tend  to  a  more  direct  development  of  the  socio- 
ethical  analogies  in  the  characterization  of  the  deity.  The 
first  pre-animistic  deity  would  also  be  the  legislator  of  the 
tribe  or  nation  and  would  thus  most  vitally  touch  the  life 
and  consciousness  of  the  people  on  its  distinctively  ethical 
side. 

If  we  were  asked  to  present  a  sketch  of  religious  history 
that  would  accord  with  the  theory  here  developed,  we  should 
not  deem  it  needful  to  modify  anything  on  which  an  intel- 
ligent reading  of  history  would  put  the  stamp  of  proba- 
bility. Starting  with  what  we  shall  here  ask  leave  to  call 
the  onto-psychological  theory  of  the  origin  of  religion,  we 
see  two  lines  of  tendency  originating;  one  the  theological 
which,  finding  its  deity  in  a  transcendent  but  largely 
mysterious    object,    proceeds    to    characterize    this    object 


452  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

mainly  through  the  use  of  the  socio-ethical  analogies,  reach- 
ing the  conception  generally  of  a  supreme  lawgiver  and  a 
being  that  puts  the  major  stress  on  moral  virtues  and 
ideals  of  conduct,  On  the  other  hand,  we  have  what  we 
have  called  the  anthropological  tendency  which  arises 
directly  out  of  a  reflection  on  self,  and  through  processes 
in  which  dream-visions  and  ghostly  apparitions  have  played 
an  important  part,  leads  ultimately  to  the  idea  of  free 
emancipated  spirits  and  to  the  belief  in  the  world  as  peopled 
with  these.  The  belief  in  spirits  affects  theology  by  lead- 
ing to  a  more  definite  ascription  of  spiritual  character  and 
attributes  to  the  deity,  and  also,  more  especially,  in  leading 
to  the  conception  of  God  as  father  of  man  and  his  race. 
But  spiritism,  on  the  other  hand,  is  largely  unethical  and 
when  unmodified  gives  rise  to  a  downward  tendency  in  relig- 
ion, embodying  itself  in  fetichism  and  various  animistic 
forms,  while  it  tends  also  to  the  corruption  of  the  ethical 
ideals  of  religion  and  to  the  diversion  of  the  religious  con- 
tent and  worship  of  the  tribes  and  nations  into  animistic 
channels  and  to  the  consequent  substitution  of  animistic 
deities  for  those  of  the  purer  and  older  type. 

We  think  that  history  in  all  its  stages  shows  traces  of 
the  development  of  this  purer  and  more  ethical  type  of 
religion,  and  that  the  central  line  of  this  development  will 
be  found -by  following  the  course  of  theological  ideas  as 
embodied  in  the  older  types  of  the  deities  of  the  various 
races  and  civilizations.  But  this  development  of  what  has 
eventuated  in  pure  ethical  monotheism  has  had  running 
parallel  with  it  and  to  some  extent  antagonistic  to  it,  an  ani- 
mistic development  which  has  •  a  distinct  root  as  we  have 
seen,  and  which  in  spite  of  its  beneficent  features  has  in  its 
pluralism  and  in  its  unethical  tendencies  proved  a  force  of 
degeneration,  corrupting  the  streams  of  the  purer  tendency 
and  in  many  instances  either  perverting  it  to  its  own  uses 
or  thrusting  it  into  the  background.  History  presents 
more  than  one  instance  of  peoples  who  recognize  the  real 
gods  of  their  purer  traditions,  but  whose  whole  system  of 


chap.  v.  OKIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  453 

worship  as  well  as  the  character  of  the  deities  to  which  it  is 
paid,  is  animistic  through  and  through.  The  real  history 
of  the  evolution  of  religion  will  be  one  that  recognizes  this 
dialectic  movement  between  the  two  streams  of  tendency,  as 
central,  and  that  finds  the  development  to  be  a  kind  of 
alternation  between  degeneration  and  regeneration  and 
that  finally  does  not  fail  to  distinguish  between  the  positive 
and  negative  poles  of  the  movement. 

Furthermore,  on  the  question  of  the  historical  relations 
which  exist  between  polytheism  and  monotheism,  whether 
monotheism  grew  out  of  polytheistic  roots  by  way  of  gen- 
eralization, or,  on  the  contrary,  polytheism  represents  a 
corruption  of  monotheism,  I  do  not  quite  see  the  necessity 
for  taking  sides.  The  controversy  overlooks  what  seems  to 
me  to  constitute  a  vital  part  of  the  situation,  and  that  is 
the  possibility  of  having  sprung  from  distinct  roots. 
Historically,  I  should  venture  to  say  that  monotheism  has 
had  its  germ  in  the  theological  tendency  from  the  begin- 
ning. The  ethical  tendency,  which  is  vital  here,  everywhere 
makes  for  unification  and  the  concentration  of  divine 
attributes  in  one  supreme  lawgiver  and  eternal  ruler. 
A  study  of  the  older  and  more  primal  deities  of  the  nations 
will  serve  to  show  that  the  monotheistic  tendency  has  been 
present  from  the  beginning ;  though  it  has  frequently  been 
broken  into  and  turned  back  by  opposing  forces.  On  the 
other  hand,  we  are  disposed  to  regard  polytheism  as  a 
direct  output  of  spiritism.  The  way  in  which  the  idea  of 
spirits  originally  arose  and  developed  would  tend  toward 
pluralism.  Polytheism  is  simply  pluralism  in  the  sphere 
of  ultimate  religious  ideas.  "When  the  tendency  arose  to  * 
deify  spirits  or  to  spiritualize  the  deity,  the  disposition  to 
multiply  gods  would  be  fostered  by  the  very  multitude  of 
spirits  there  were  to  choose  from,  while  the  comparative 
indifference  of  spiritism  to  moral  distinctions  would  fall 
in  with  the  well-known  unethical  character  of  polytheism 
in  general.  Once  admit  that  polytheism  has  its  roots  in 
spiritism  and  it  then  becomes  perfectly  conceivable  that  poly- 


454  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

theism  and  monotheism,  in  germ  at  least,  may  have  co- 
existed throughout  a  large  period  of  their  development 
without  being  connected  by  any  very  close  logical  relations. 
It  has  been  the  presumption  of  anthropology  that,  because 
polytheism  represents  a  lower  moral  type  of  religion  as 
well  as  a  lower  condition  of  religious  thought,  logically 
considered,  therefore  it  must  have  preceded  monotheism 
historically,  and  monotheism  must  have  evolved  out  of  it 
as  a  higher  out  of  a  lower  form.  We  dislike  to  disturb 
this  reasoning,  but  it  is  not  convincing.  If  it  be  possible 
to  trace  the  monotheistic  and  polytheistic  tendencies  to 
distinct  roots,  then  the  question,  Which  is  the  older?  will 
not  be  so  vital  as  the  question,  How  do,  or  did,  these  tend- 
encies originate,  and  Which  represents  the  truer  and  higher 
tendency  in  religion?  Now,  we  have  indicated  our  dis- 
belief in  the  theory  that  either  has  necessarily  been 
developed  from  the  other.  We  think  we  have  shown  that 
it  is  more  reasonable  to  refer  them,  in  the  first  instance,  to 
distinct  roots,  and  we  have  indicated  what  we  think  these 
roots  are.  One  who  sees  his  way  clear  to  agreeing  with 
these  conclusions  will  find  that  they  help  to  make  him 
clear  on  several  other  points  of  importance.  He  will  be 
able  to  construct  a  concept  of  religious  evolution  in  which 
the  development  will  proceed  largely  as  a  dialectic  between 
these  two  tendencies.  And  he  will  understand  why  it  is 
that  while  polytheism  on  account  of  its  unethical  character 
has  been  in  the  main  a  corrupting  force  in  religion,  yet  it 
has  had  its  mission  to  perform  notwithstanding.  Poly- 
theism represents  pluralism  in  religion.  Now  pluralism 
in  theology  is  pure  individualism,  and  pure  individualism 
in  theology  is  a  disintegrating  principle  which  strikes  not 
simply  at  unity  but  also  at  morality.  But  on  the  an- 
thropological side,  which  is  that  of  spiritism  out  of  which 
polytheism  has  developed,  the  same  general  causes  which 
produced  the  bitter  fruit  have  also  been  tributary  to  the 
development  of  the  idea  of  spirit,  an  idea  that  underlies  a 
whole  side  of  religion,  since  out  of  the  belief  in  spirits  grew 


chap.  v.  OEIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  455 

the  conception  of  personal  immortality  and  the  belief  in  it 
which  is  present  in  some  form  in  most  pagan  religions.  On 
this  basis  the  history  of  religion  completes  itself  in  two  final 
steps,  (1)  the  triumph  of  ethical  monotheism  over  poly- 
theism in  theology,  (2)  the  synthesis  of  an  adequate  mono- 
theistic theology  with  an  adequate  doctrine  of  personal 
immortality.  Or,  if  we  admit  soteriology  also,  our  ideal 
of  religious  evolution  would  culminate  in  a  pure  theism  in 
synthesis  with  an  anthropology  which  would  associate  the 
doctrine  of  personal  immortality  with  a  pure  theory  of 
retribution. 

Returning  again  to  the  question  of  the  origin  of  religion, 
I  am  unable  to  agree  with  Max  Miiller  in  his  postulate  of  a 
sense  of  the  infinite  as  a  special  faculty.  It  seems  to  me 
that  in  the  recognition  of  what  I  have  called  the  sense  or 
feeling  of  transcendence  which  has  its  root  in  our  feeling 
of  helplessness  in  the  presence  of  overwhelming  power,  we 
virtually  achieve  all  that  Miiller  contends  for,  without  pos- 
tulating a  special  faculty.  If,  however,  I  may  be  allowed  to 
translate  his  '  faculty  of  the  infinite '  into  my  own  '  feeling  of 
transcendence, '  then  I  confess  to  being  very  much  in  sympa- 
thy with  his  doctrine.  He  has  done  great  service  in  calling 
attention  to  the  psychological  side  of  the  problem  at  a  time 
when  it  was  in  danger  of  being  forgotten.  Moreover, 
Miiller 's  insistence  on  the  fact  that  the  infinite  is  involved 
in  the  conception  of  God  is  confirmation  of  our  own  con- 
tention that  transcendence  is  essential  to  the  idea  of  the 
deity.  Not  only  so,  but  it  constitutes  its  most  character- 
istic and  distinctive  element.  For  this  reason  I  am  unable  to 
admit  that  the  anthropologists  who  find  the  roots  of  relig- 
ion solely  in  animism  have  given  us  anything  like  an  ade- 
quate account  of  the  origin  of  the  idea  of  the  transcendence 
or  infiniteness  of  the  deity.  It  is  a  characteristic  weakness 
of  the  animistic  theories  in  general  that  their  logic  tends 
altogether  in  the  direction  of  purely  humanistic  deities. 
They  seem  to  rest  on  the  presumption  that  religion  is  a 
purely  man-made  affair  and  that  it  can  rest  satisfied  with  a 


456  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

purely  man-made  god.  I  for  one  am  not  prepared  to 
accept  either  the  premise  or  the  conclusion  of  such  rea- 
soning. 

As  to  the  theory  of  origin  advocated  here,  that  will  have 
to  stand  or  fall  on  its  own  evidence.  That  religion  origi- 
nated in  some  great  objective  experience  which  at  the  same 
time  awakened  the  proto-human  into  a  reflective  being,  and 
that  subjective  reflection  and  the  use  of  the  self -analogy 
constituted  a  second  step  in  the  history  of  man's  religious 
experience,  are  propositions  that  must  in  some  respects 
remain  hypothetical.  There  is  no  direct  evidence  to  prove 
or  disprove,  as  there  is  none  to  prove  or  disprove  the  theory 
of  the  anthropologists.  We  have  given  good  and  sub- 
stantial reasons,  however,  for  the  acceptance  of  the  theory, 
and  these  reasons  have  been  drawn  alike  from  logic  and 
history.  A  further  confirmation  of  the  position  of  the 
objective  origin  of  religion  will  be  found,  I  think,  in  the 
fact  that  without  exception,  so  far  as  I  am  able  to  dis- 
cover, the  primitive  deities  were  objective  rather  than 
subjective,  embodying,  like  the  gods  of  the  Vedas,  some  of 
the  great  objects  or  forces  of  nature  which  at  first  were  but 
vaguely,  if  at  all,  personified.  "The  history  of  the  ancient 
religion  of  India,"  says  Max  Miiller,  "so  far  as  we  have 
hitherto  been  able  to  trace  it,  is  to  us  a  history  of  the 
various  attempts  at  naming  the  infinite  that  hides  itself 
behind  the  veil  of  the  finite.  We  saw  how  the  ancient  Aryans 
of  India,  the  poets  of  the  Veda,  first  faced  the  invisible,  the 
unknown,  or  the  infinite  in  trees,  mountains,  and  rivers; 
in  the  dawn  and  the  sun;  in  the  fire,  the  storm-wind  and 
the  thunder;  how  they  ascribed  to  all  of  them  a  self,  a 
substance,  a  divine  support  or  whatever  else  we  like  to  call 
it,  and  how  in  doing  so  they  always  felt  the  presence  of 
something  they  could  not  see,  behind  what  they  could  see, 
of  something  supernatural  behind  the  natural,  of  some- 
thing superfinite  or  infinite  behind  or  within  the  finite." 
I  fail  to  see  how  else  than  through  the  calling  forth  of 
man's  sense  of  transcendence  by  his  experiencing  objec- 


chap.  v.  ORIGIN  AND  DEVELOPMENT.  457 

tively  some  of  the  great  objects  and  forces  of  nature,  the 
characteristic  idea  of  religion  could  be  awakened.  What 
the  animistic  theories  fail  to  do  is  to  give  any  adequate 
account  of  the  fact  that  this  feeling  of  transcendence  or 
infinity  is  so  ingrained  in  religion. 

Before  closing  this  chapter  one  other  point  is  worthy  of 
mention.  In  the  above  representation  nothing  has  been 
said  as  to  the  necessity  or  function  of  divine  revelation  in 
the  sphere  of  religion.  Here  we  shall  have  to  content  our- 
selves with  two  remarks.  In  the  first  place,  we  have  pro- 
ceeded on  the  supposition  here  that  man  is  by  nature  a 
religious  being  and  that  he  would,  revelation  or  no  revela- 
tion, feel  his  way  after  God,  if  haply  he  might  find  him. 
No  one  denies  that  man  without  supernatural  aid  would 
come  into  some  kind  of  relation  with  God.  Now,  the  theory 
developed  above  is  claimed  to  be  the  most  reasonable  ac- 
count of  the  way  this  would  be  brought  about.  In  the 
second  place  a  divine  revelation  must  be  communicated 
through  human  channels.  What  is  claimed  here  is  that  the 
most  rational  theory  of  the  origin  of  religion  as  a  feature 
of  the  life  of  humanity  will  also  be  most  favorable  to,  and 
most  easily  adapted  to,  the  function  of  divine  revelation 
if  that  should  be  found  to  be  necessary.1 

1  The  reason  for  this  is  obvious.  If  religion  be  real  and  not 
spurious,  then  its  great  object,  God,  is  real.  It  is  agreed  on  all 
hands  that  man's  religion  arises  and  develops  as  a  phase  of  his 
experience.  If  then  we,  from  the  outset,  be  part  and  parcel  of  the 
life  of  humanity,  and  on  the  other  hand  if  God,  its  great  object,  be 
real,  religion  will,  from  the  outset,  have  its  divine  root  and  origin  in 
the  dynamic  relation  of  God  to  the  human  soul.  In  the  operation  of 
the  divine  Spirit  or  Logos  in  the  historical  life  of  humanity,  this 
divine  energy  will  penetrate  into  human  experience  whether 
through  ordinary  or  superordinary  channels ;  whether  revelatory  in 
the  ordinary  or  the  superordinary  sense;  and  the  whole  history  of 
religion  will  have  its  divine  roots.  In  order  to  write  this  history  of 
religion  truly  it  is  necessary  that  the  historian  should  have  made 
this  divine-human  synthesis,  and  when  he  has  done  so  he  may  write 
the  whole  story  as  an  evolution;  as  a  struggle  upward.  But  he 
must  be  made  to  take  account  of  lapses  and   degenerations  as  well 


458  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

as  advances.  In  the  next  chapter  this  phase  of  the  story  will 
be  emphasized.  Here  the  point  of  importance  is  the  fact  that  the 
most  rational  and  adequate  account  of  religion  on  the  human  side 
will  be  likely  also  to  prove  most  favorable  to  the  recognition  of  its 
divine  and  even  supernatural  elements. 


CHAPTER  VI. 


THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS. 


We  come  at  length  to  the  question  of  method:  to  the  de- 
termination of  the  extent  to  which  religion  may  be  made 
a  subject  of  scientific  investigation.  And  here  our  inquiry 
resolves  itself  into  two  questions.  (1)  How  far  may  relig- 
ion be  dealt  with  as  a  natural  science  falling  under  the 
category  of  natural  causation?  and  (2)  Is  there  a  sphere 
for  a  science  of  religion  above  the  level  of  natural  causa- 
tion? In  order  to  treat  these  questions  intelligently  a 
distinction  needs  to  be  drawn  between  religion  as  a  per- 
sonal experience  and  phenomenon  of  consciousness,  and 
religion  as  an  objective  phenomenon  of  the  historic  order 
of  the  world ;  and  it  is  clearly  in  the  latter  sense,  if  at  all, 
that  religion  may  be  treated  as  a  natural  science.  What- 
ever has  a  history  that  may  be  written  in  terms  of  public 
events,  objective  rituals  and  institutions,  will  lay  itself 
broadly  open  to  the  scrutiny  of  science.  But  here  we  are 
attempting  to  discover  the  limit,  not  of  science  broadly 
speaking,  but  of  natural  science  with  its  rubric  of  natural 
causation.  We  have  found  that  psychology  itself  may  be 
treated  as  a  natural  science  whenever  it  is  possible  to  bring 
the  investigation  down  to  the  basis  of  the  psycho-physical 
parallelism.  The  generic  limit  of  science  is  found  in  the  fact 
that  it  is  an  investigation  of  phenomena  and  professes  no 
independent  insight  into  their  grounds.  But  natural  science 
has  a  specific  limit.     Only  those  phenomena  that  are  phys- 

459 


460  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

ical  or  that  are  reducible  to  the  basis  of  the  psychological 
parallelism  are  open  to  treatment  by  natural  science 
methods.  Now,  that  there  is  a  sphere  in  which  religion  as  a 
historic  phenomenon  is  open  to  such  treatment,  we  are 
prepared  to  admit.  For  example,  in  connection  with  the 
question  of  the  origin  of  religion,  natural  science  could 
deal  with  the  physical  conditions  of  its  rise  (including  both 
organic  and  inorganic),  embracing  in  its  scope  the  physical 
environment  in  its  broad  sense  as  well  as  the  physiological 
and  biological  conditions  of  man's  life.  These  causes,  in 
so  far  as  they  have  had  a  bearing  on  the  problem  of  origin, 
would  be  clearly  in  the  province  of  natural  science.  What- 
ever transcended  these  would  lie  in  debatable  territory, 
while  with  respect  to  the  distinctively  spiritual  phenomena, 
and  especially  with  regard  to  the  question  of  the  operation 
of  superordinary  causes,  natural  science  could  have  little 
to  say.  When,  however,  the  question  is  one  of  the  develop- 
ment of  religion  in  the  world,  natural  science  will  have  a 
wider  field.  Religion  as  a  race-phenomenon  is  complicated 
with  all  the  physical  and  physiological  conditions  that 
affect  the  life  of  man.  The  anthropologist  who  investigates 
religions  in  their  native  habitats  finds  himself  brought 
more  and  more  under  the  spell  of  the  physical  forces,  and 
just  as  the  physiologist  is  tempted  to  say  that  man  is  what 
he  eats,  so  the  anthropologist  will  be  more  or  less  oppressed 
with  the  conviction  that  man's  religion  is  a  reflex  of  his 
physical  conditions.  This  is  no  doubt  extreme,  but  it  is  only 
the  exaggeration  of  an  indisputable  fact.  The  development 
of  religion  may  be  treated  as  a  natural  science  within 
certain  limits,  and  its  aim  will  be  analogous  to  that  of 
physiological  psychology,  which  proceeds  on  the  statement 
of  the  laws  of  mind  in  terms  of  its  physiological  envelope. 
We  may  say  that  the  treatment  of  religion  as  a  natural 
science  will  have  as  its  aim  the  development  of  a  physiology 
of  religion,  or  at  least  an  account  of  religious  phenomena, 
that  is  developed  from  physiological  data;  only,  the  mind 
that  is  now  being  studied  will  be  operating  on  the  broad  so- 


chap.  vi.  THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  4(31 

cial  arena  of  history  and  the  brain  that  correlates  with  it 
will  be  made  up  of  the  groups  of  living  organisms  that  con- 
stitute the  physical  basis  of  that  mind.  In  Herbert 
Spencer's  Principles  of  Sociology  we  have  an  overuse,  it 
seems  to  me,  of  analogies  drawn  from  biology  and  phys- 
iology; but  the  legitimacy  of  the  method  is  admitted  here. 
To  say  that  religion  may  be  treated  as  a  natural  science 
is  to  say  that  there  is  a  point  of  view  from  which  the 
psycho-physical  parallelism  is  valid  and  that  from  this  point 
of  view  religion  may  be  brought  under  the  sway  of  natural 
causation. 

Where,  then,  shall  we  look  for  the  limits  to  the  natural 
science  view  of  religion  ?  This  question  ought  not  to  be  very 
difficult  at  this  point  of  our  discussion.  We  have  seen  that 
the  natural  science  treatment  rests  on  the  psycho-physical 
parallelism;  and  it  may  be  assumed  that  it  will  end  at 
the  point  where  the  parallelism  can  no  longer  be  pre- 
sumed to  exist.  Up  to  this  point  natural  causation  would 
be  the  only  vera  causa  that  need  be  taken  into  account. 
Is  there  a  point,  then,  in  the  movements  of  religion  where 
the  presumption  of  the  parallelism  breaks  down  and  where, 
therefore,  the  science  of  religion  ceases  to  be  purely  natural  ? 
In  order  to  answer  this  question  it  will  be  necessary  to  look 
at  the  phenomena  of  religion  on  their  social  and  ethical 
side  rather  than  in  the  light  of  their  physical  environment. 
We  have  seen  that  religion  arises  as  a  phenomenon  of  the 
social  consciousness  of  man,  and  this  is  true  both  sub- 
jectively and  in  the  objective  sense.  The  phenomena  of 
religion  belong  by  virtue  of  their  substance  to  sociology  and 
only  indirectly  and  symbolically  to  physiology.  May  it 
not  be  true  that  it  is  in  its  sociological  character  that 
religion  transcends  the  limits  of  natural  science?  This 
question  raises  expectations  that  may  perhaps  be  disap- 
pointed, for  we  remember  that  there  are  aspects  of  sociology 
which  fall  under  the  rubrics  of  natural  science.  It  is  only 
when  we  are  in  the  field  of  social  reflection  that  we  begin  to 
transcend  the  limits  of  natural  causation  and  we  are  only 


462  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

certain  of  having  so  done  when  we  find  consciousness  exer- 
cising a  mode  of  determination  that  is  clearly  neither  in 
form  nor  in  content  a  mode  of  natural  causation.  Now  I 
think  it  will  be  clear  that  we  do  come  upon  such  a  mode 
in  what  we  call  ethical  determination,  that  is,  a  determina- 
tion that  is  reached  in  the  face  of  the  moral  dilemma 
which  presents  the  forces  of  desire  and  duty  in  con- 
flict and  the  decision  of  which  is  in  favor  of  duty  and 
against  desire.  Here  we  have  a  kind  of  determination  that 
is  at  the  same  time  not  natural  causation,  and  is  yet  a  vera 
causa,  for  it  is  the  assertion  of  an  agency  in  the  world  in 
which  a  self  determines  itself  by  the  pressure  of  ideals 
which  oblige,  not  by  the  pressure  of  desires  which  in- 
duce. We  strike  here  the  great  epochal  act  in  the  drama  of 
human  experience,  the  act  in  which  a  man  achieves  his  own 
freedom  by  exercising  the  power  of  determining  himself 
against  his  desires  and  in  favor  of  an  ideal  of  duty. 

Now,  we  have  learned  that  one  of  the  sources  of  religion 
x  is  found  in  the  ethical  consciousness  and  that  it  is  through 
this  that  the  ethical  attributes  and  prerogatives  are  sup- 
plied to  the  deity.  We  have  also  seen  that  religion  is  an 
objective  social  phenomenon  and  that  the  ethical  issues  will, 
therefore,  arise  and  be  decided  on  the  arena  of  the  historical 
consciousness  as  truly  as  on  that  of  the  individual.  The 
thesis,  then,  that  we  maintain  here  is  that  in  so  far  as  the 
ethical  motive  enters  into  the  historical  working  out  of 
religion  we  have  a  force  at  work  that  transcends  natural 
causation;  and  that  in  so  far  as  this  ethical  motive  is 
triumphant  in  bringing  about  ethical  results  there  is  a 
vera  causa  at  work  whose  effects  are  not  explicable  by  the 
principle  of  natural  causation.  We  have  found  in  another 
place  that  when  consciousness  becomes  reflective  it  begins 
to  exercise  a  peculiar  form  of  agency,  that  of  determining 
itself  by  ideals.  This  is  the  form  of  freedom.  But  it 
cannot  be  made  demonstrably  certain  that  it  is  also  the 
matter  of  freedom,  till  we  arrive  at  the  crucial  point  of 
ethical  choice  in  which  the  ideal  triumphs  over  the  body  of 


chap.  vi.  THE  ."RELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  463 

its  adversary  and  finds  in  the  slain  desire  the  symbol  of  its 
own  reality.  The  point  where  the  ethical  motive  in  the 
movements  of  religion  must  be  recognized  is  one  where 
these  movements  begin  to  transcend  the  limits  of  a  natural 
science  and  require  to  be  treated  from  some  point  of 
view  that  will  not  be  inconsistent  with  the  recognition 
of  forms  of  determination  which  cannot  be  subsumed  under 
the  principle  of  natural  causation. 

If  it  be  asked  how  religion  is  to  be  treated  scientifically 
at  all  from  any  other  point  of  view  than  that  of  natural 
causation,  I  could  only  answer,  ( 1 )  that  I  do  not  find  myself 
scandalized  by  the  thought  that  there  may  be  important 
respects  in  which  religion  altogether  refuses  to  yield  to 
scientific  treatment.  William  James  has  reminded  us  very 
impressively  that  the  science  point  of  view  is  not  only  not 
the  sole  point  of  view  that  is  possible,  but  that,  historically, 
it  is  a  mere  upstart  compared  with  older  methods  of  looking 
at  the  world.  He  reminds  us  that  the  world  got  on  and  be- 
came wise  in  many  ways  without  science.  But  this  is  not  the 
most  important  part  of  my  answer.  (2)  That  we  find  in 
ethics  itself  an  example  of  a  science  that  is  in  a  large  part  of 
its  scope  ideal  and  normative.  Ethics  as  a  normative  science 
rests  on  the  presumption  that  the  form  of  determination 
which  we  have  called  freedom  is  a  vera  causa.  Otherwise 
it  would  be  a  normative  science  only  in  appearance.  And 
what  we  maintain  here  is  that  the  science  of  religion,  at  a 
certain  point  where  it  ceases  to  treat  of  the  conditions  of 
religious  development  on  the  basis  of  the  psycho-physical 
parallelism  and  takes  up  this  problem  of  the  working  out 
of  religious  movements  in  the  light  of  the  ethical  motives 
and  ideals  which  are  active  in  them,  will  find  it  necessary  to 
supplement  its  principle  of  natural  causation  with  the  prin- 
ciple of  finality  which  is  the  form  of  determination  that 
prevails  in  the  normative  sciences.  And  here  I  think  we 
shall  begin  to  reap  the  fruit  of  some  of  the  distinctions  of 
the  previous  chapter.  If  we  distinguish  the  theistic- 
ethical  movement  in  religious  history  from  the  more  an- 


464  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

thropological  movement  of  animism  or  spiritism,  which  is 
relatively  unethical,  we  shall  find  that  -just  in  proportion  as 
an  unethical  animism  tends  to  prevail  and  determine  the 
course  of  development,  it  tends  also  to  fall  under  the 
dominion  of  the  physical  agencies  of  natural  causation; 
whereas,  we  find  that  wherever  the  theistic-ethical  force 
comes  to  the  front  it  tends  to  show  its  individuality  by 
embodying  itself  in  some  prophet  or  moral  reformer  whose 
appeal  to  conscience  and  to  ethical  choice  proves  itself  a 
vera  causa  of  a  different  type  from  that  of  natural 
causation. 

"We  pass  here,  without  exhausting  our  theme,  to  consider 
the  metaphysical  aspects  of  religion.  In  order  to  connect 
the  considerations  to  be  developed  here  with  former  meta- 
physical results  it  is  important,  however,  that  we  should 
refresh  our  memories  with  some  conclusions  reached  in 
treating  of  the  metaphysics  of  sociology  and  ethics.  We 
found  in  dealing  with  the  last  issues  of  sociology  that  we 
were  led  to  the  postulate  of  an  eternal  consciousness  as  the 
only  medium  in  which  the  issues  aroused  by  the  social  could 
be  ideally  realized.  In  short,  we  found  that  a  failure  to 
postulate  such  a  consciousness  would  be  tantamount  to 
leaving  our  whole  social  world,  in  the  last  analysis,  irra- 
tional. Coming  down  to  the  metaphysical  consideration  of 
the  ethical  it  was  found  that  it  is  only  when  freedom  is 
referred  back  for  its  grounds  to  the  ethical  determination 
of  an  ethical  will  and  purpose,  that  it  can,  in  the  last 
analysis,  vindicate  its  character  as  a  vera  causa  against  the 
claims  of  natural  causation.  The  social  and  the  ethical 
thus  combine  in  the  postulate  of  a  transcendent  ground. 
Now  the  metaphysical  bearings  of  religion  will  be  to  seek 
in  the  great  fact  of  transcendence  which  in  the  religious 
consciousness  first  exceeds  the  character  of  a  postulate 
and  becomes  a  real  possession.  I  do  not  mean  that  the 
transcendent  object  is  given  here  in  an  intuition,  but 
rather  as  an  immediate  inference  from  certain  expe- 
riences   which    we   have    already    attempted    to    describe. 


chap.  vi.  THE  RELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  465 

A  few  words  here  will  be  sufficient,  I  think,  to  bring  out 
the  real  force  of  the  metaphysical  implication.  In  a  former 
section  of  these  discussions  and  as  the  result  of  an  elaborate 
analysis  we  reached  the  conclusion  that  the  ground  of  our 
certitude  of  other  existents  besides  ourselves  is  not  an 
intuition  but  an  immediate  spontaneous  inference  from 
certain  features  of  our  perceptions.  This  we  found  to  be 
true  of  all  objects  whether  mental  or  physical.  We  could 
not  agree  with  those  who  hold  that  we  have  an  intuitive 
knowledge  of  the  existence  of  the  minds  of  others.  Now, 
socially  we  do  not  and  cannot  doubt  the  existence  of  other 
minds.  I  ought  to  say,  perhaps,  that  doubt  is  possible  but 
that  it  is  felt  to  be  absurd.  But  the  basis  on  which  we 
hold  the  transcendent  object  of  religion  is  what  we  have 
called  an  immediate  reflective  inference  from  certain  unique 
phenomena.  We  do  not  assert  that  our  knowledge  of  God 
is  intuitive.  If  that  were  true  it  would  no  doubt  be  as  diffi- 
cult for  us  to  doubt  the  existence  of  God  as  it  is  now  to  doubt 
our  own  existence  or  the  object  of  our  perceptions.  This  is 
possible,  but  it  is  felt  to  be  absurd.  Our  certitude  of  God's 
existence,  or  of  the  transcendent  object  of  religion,  is  not  a 
spontaneous  inference  of  the  immediate  kind,  inasmuch  as 
God  is  not  an  object  of  spontaneous  belief  or  affirmation. 
The  certitude  of  an  immediate  spontaneous  inference  is  less 
dubitable  than  that  of  an  immediate  reflective  inference. 
The  reflective  inference  is  more  dubitable  because  it  involves 
an  additional  step  beyond  spontaneity.  But  the  transcend- 
ent object,  being  the  object  of  an  immediate  reflective  infer- 
ence and  being,  as  we  have  maintained,  the  object  of  the  first 
inferential  step  with  which  reflection  begins,  is  so  little 
dubitable  that  it  stands  as  the  common  possession  and  the 
most  fundamental  belief  of  the  religious  consciousness  in 
all  forms  of  its  manifestation. 

Now  it  is  upon  this  basal  datum  of  the  religious  con- 
sciousness that  two  doctrines  of  the  metaphysics  of  religion 
have  been  developed;  namely,  the  idea  of  God  or  the 
supreme  being,  and  the  doctrine  of  the  eternal  conscious- 

30 


466  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

ness  as  the  bearer  of  an  all-comprehending  thought  and 
purpose.  That  it  is  the  germ  of  the  idea  of  God  and  that 
the  theistic  conception  is  directly  traceable  to  it  admits  of 
little  reasonable  doubt.  This  central  norm  of  transcendent 
existence  we  have  found  to  be  the  nucleus  of  direct  ethical 
and  personal  characterization  and  around  it  theistic  con- 
ceptions have  organized  themselves  in  all  times;  whereas, 
in  the  animistic  forms  of  religion  in  which  this  central 
datum  is  greatly  obscured,  if  it  exists  at  all  to  any 
appreciable  degree,  the  tendency  is  to  lose  the  idea  of  God 
in  the  multitude  of  deities  and  spirits. 

The  second  metaphysical  doctrine,  that  of  the  eternal 
consciousness  as  the  bearer  of  an  all-comprehending  thought 
and  purpose,  springs  directly,  not  out  of  the  heart  of  the 
datum  of  transcendence,  but  rather  out  of  this  datum  when 
its  character  has  been  developed  by  means  of  the  personal 
and  ethical  analogies.  It  is  not  simply  the  transcendent 
deity  as  the  bearer  of  the  ethical  consciousness,  but 
this  transcendence  as  personalized  and  moralized  and 
thus  brought  into  relations  with  the  world  and  espe- 
cially with  man's  own  conscious  life.  Inevitably  then, 
through  the  ascription  of  thought  and  purpose  to  this 
being,  its  transcendence  will  be  qualified  and  it  will  be 
conceived  as  the  bearer  of,  if  not  identical  with,  a  con- 
sciousness that  will  be  commensurate  with  that  sweep  of 
intelligence  and  purpose  which  has  been  ascribed  to  it. 
And  logic  here  confirms  probable  history ;  for  in  postulating 
God  at  all  in  any  real  theistic  sense,  we  by  implication 
postulate  an  eternal  consciousness.  For  we  have  seen  that 
religion  is  not  only  an  affair  of  consciousness;  but  of 
reflective  consciousness.  The  analogy  of  the  self  that 
dominates,  therefore,  in  developing  the  concept  of  the  deity 
will  be  that  of  the  reflective  self  which  relates  itself  to  the 
world  through  its  ideas  and  purposive  aims.  This,  it  must 
not  be  forgotten,  is  involved  in  the  very  texture  of  reflective 
activity.  It  would  be  as  normal,  then,  as  it  would  be  in- 
evitable, that,  having  reached  the  idea  of  a  deity  that  is  the 


chap.  vi.  THE  KELIGTOUS  SYNTHESIS.  467 

analogue  of  the  reflective  self,  this  deity  should  be  con- 
ceived as  related  to  man  and  the  world  as  man  is  related  to 
his  own  reflective  products,— namely,  through  previsional 
idea  and  purpose.  The  divine  thought  would  thus  form  the 
basis  of  such  attributes  as  omniscience,  when  viewed  mainly 
from  the  side  of  knowledge,  and  wisdom  when  thought  is 
touched  with  the  ethical  quality ;  while  the  divine  purpose, 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  power  involved  in  which  God 
would  be  regarded  as  a  vera  causa,  would  give  rise  to  the  at- 
tribute of  omnipotence.  Ethically  conceived,  it  would  ground 
the  attribute  of  righteousness  which  we  have  found  to  be  so 
fundamental  in  the  history  of  theistic  beliefs.  It  is  a 
short  and  necessary  step  of  inference  from  such  attributes 
as  omniscience,  omnipotence,  transcendent  righteousness, 
to  the  idea  of  an  eternal  consciousness  as  the  necessary 
bearer  or  medium  of  such  attributes. 

What  we  may  call  the  dialectic  of  reflection  would  here 
no  doubt  move  through  such  stages  as  the  following :  The 
first  movement  of  reflection  would  consist  in  affirming  and 
setting  out  before  the  aroused  apprehension,  a  transcendent 
and,  for  the  most  part,  uncharacterized,  object.  But  this 
movement  would  scarcely  be  separable  from  a  second  im- 
pulse which  would  be  that  of  characterization.  The  prin- 
ciple of  this  would  be  some  form  of  the  self-analogy ;  and  the 
transcendent  object  would  begin,  however  vaguely,  to  as- 
sume the  character  of  a  personal  and  ethical  being.  All  this 
may  be  regarded  as  involved  in  the  first  impulse  or  pro-pulse 
of  the  religious  consciousness.  Now,  we  have  found  reasons 
for  thinking  that  the  root  of  animism,  and  consequently  of 
polytheism  proper,  in  religion  is  to  be  sought  in  the  human- 
istic development  of  the  idea  of  spirits  and  the  belief  in 
their  separate  existence.  Animism  thus  supplies  in  its 
conception  of  spirits  an  important  factor  in  religion  and, 
in  connection  with  the  primary  movement  described  above, 
is  essential  to  religious  development.  But  separated  from 
this  it  tends  to  the  polytheistic  extreme  and  gravitates 
toward  superstition.     This  is  generally  the  secret  of  those 


/ 


468  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

religious  declines  of  which  history  is  full.  And  the  cure 
comes  in  a  reform  that  restores  the  animistic  branch  to  its 
transcendent  stem.  The  impulse  arises  in  most  instances 
in  the  mind  of  some  spiritually-gifted  individual  who 
forthwith  becomes  a  prophet  and  a  reformer.  He,  in  most 
instances,  leads  an  advance  in  religious  conceptions  under 
the  form  of  a  return  to  a  former  and  purer  faith.  The 
ideal  of  the  past  is,  of  course,  the  parent  religious  stem 
before  it  became  degenerate  and  no  real  return  to  it  is 
possible  except  through  an  advance  that  will  reinstate  it 
on  a  higher  plane.  And  this  is  the  way  that  it  will  be 
accomplished  historically.  The  prophet  or  reformer  will 
lead  his  people  on  to  a  conception  that  tends  to  cure 
superstition  by  overcoming  polytheism.  This  will  be 
effected  in  the  restoration  of  the  divine  transcendence  in 
a  sense  that  shall  be  consistent  with  a  purified  form  of  the 
second,  or,  as  we  may  call  it,  the  humanistic  movement. 
The  notion  of  the  deity  will  not  be  completely  stripped  of 
attributes  derived  from  human  analogies,  but  he  will  be 
freed  from  degrading,  grossly  anthropomorphic  and  mere- 
ly human  attributes  and  his  worship  will  be  purged  from 
immorality  and  superstition.  Logically,  this  third  move- 
ment may  be  represented  as  follows:  Having  humanly 
characterized  an  ultra-human  being,  a  contradiction  arises 
in  consciousness  and  leads  to  a  third  movement  of  re- 
flection in  which  the  negative,  humanistic  movement  is 
aufgehoben,  and  a  synthesis  is  reached  in  which  the  notion 
of  the  ultra-human  being  is  qualified  by  a  kind  of  person- 
alization which  we  may  represent  here  as  the  infinitation 
of  the  human  analogies.  In  other  words,  instead  of  simply 
cancelling  the  negative  humanistic  tendency  when  it  is 
found  to  be  inconsistent  with  the  notion  of  a  transcendent 
being,  and  thus  refusing  to  ascribe  any  attributes  involv- 
ing human  conceptions  of  intelligence,  thought,  or  pur- 
pose, what  actually  takes  place  is  the  infinitating  of  these 
conceptions  themselves  so  that  they  become  all-compre- 
hending and   eternal   instead  of  finite,   fragmentary   and 


chap.  vi.  THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  469 

limited  to  a  segment  of  time.  And  the  synthesis  in  which 
the  higher  unity  will  be  reached  is  one,  therefore,  in  which 
the  deity  is  represented  as  the  subject  or  bearer  of  an 
eternal  consciousness  which  is  commensurate  with  the 
exercise  of  a  thought  and  purpose  all-comprehending 
and  all-determining.  The  logic  of  reflection  thus  leads 
to  a  metaphysical  conclusion  that  seems  to  get  confirmation 
from  an  enlightened  reading  of  religious  history. 

Another  element  in  the  metaphysics  of  religion  arises  in 
connection  with  the  logos-idea.  We  mean  by  the  logos- 
idea,  the  notion  of  some  mediatory  synthesis  in  the  char- 
acter of  the  divine  and  human.  Let  us  suppose  that  the 
synthesis  indicated  above  has  been  working  itself  out  along 
its  own  lines.  If  we  were  to  suppose  it  completed  it 
would  not  have  solved  the  problem  contemplated  in  the 
logos.  The  former  problem  arose,  as  we  saw,  out  of  the 
relation  between  the  ultra-human  deity  and  the  human- 
istic mode  of  representing  him.  But  this  problem  arises 
out  of  the  relation  between  the  deity  that  is  the  bearer  of 
the  eternal  thoughts  and  purposes,  and  the  finite  life  of 
man  in  time.  The  problem  is  one  of  mediation  in  order 
that  the  finite  spirit  of  man  may  come  into  unity  of  life 
with  the  divine.  But  the  problem  would  arise  in  a  differ- 
ent quarter  of  the  religious  heavens  from  the  one  we  have 
just  considered.  It  would  not  be  so  much  a  degeneracy 
of  religion,  as  a  kind  of  indifference  to  religion,  a  tendency 
to  neglect  the  greater  deities  on  account  of  their  abstractness 
and  seeming  aloofness  from  human  affairs,  that  would  call 
forth  the  efforts  toward  reform.  The  movement  would  be 
of  the  type  of  that  which  arose  among  the  re-collected 
Israelites  under  Ezra  and  Nehemiah.  It  was  not  so  much 
idolatry  and  superstition  these  men  had  to  contend  with, 
as  irreligion  and  indifference.  They  preached  a  re- 
vival, reinstating  the  reading  of  the  Hebrew  scriptures 
and  the  religious  observances  that  had  been  neglected  and 
leading  the  people  to  covenant  to  restore  the  family  observ- 
ance of  religion.     No  doubt  this  tendency  for  the  tran- 


470  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

scendent  deity  to  become  shadowy  and  abstract  would  sup- 
ply one  of  the  conditions  of  degeneracy.  But  what  we 
maintain  here  is  that  it  carries  at  its  heart  its  own  special 
problem.  It  is  the  problem  of  vital  religion,— how  to  bring 
the  divine  more  vitally  into  the  life  of  the  human.  In 
the  very  nature  of  the  case  the  sense  of  the  need  of  media- 
tion would  not  arise  during  the  first  stage  of  religious 
experience.  It  would  only  be  in  the  second  stage  when 
polytheism  had  become  rampant  and  when  a  danger  had 
arisen  that  the  more  transcendent  deities  of  the  older 
time  would  be  set  aside,  or  at  least  relegated  to  the  back- 
ground, that  the  sense  of  such  a  need  could  become  much 
felt.  And  here  again  it  is  not  likely  that  it  would  be  gener- 
ally felt.  What  would  be  generally  felt  would  be  the 
growing  aloofness  of  the  non-humanistic  deities,  along  with 
a  leaning  toward  the  humanistic  deities  on  account  of  their 
greater  intimacy  with  men.  The  need  would  be  felt  by  the 
prophet-reformer  who,  if  his  reform  embodied  a  real  ad- 
vance, would  somehow  meet  the  requirement  of  closer 
intimacy.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  prophet  or  re- 
former himself  would  become  the  instrument  of  this 
mediation ;  not  that  he  would  in  any  sense  identify  himself 
with  the  deity,  but  he  would  become  a  conscious  and,  in 
some  way  attested,  channel  of  communication  between  the 
divine  and  the  human,  and  during  his  lifetime  the  media- 
tion would  be  accomplished.  But  the  idea  of  mediation 
is  only  completely  achieved  in  the  logos:  the  idea  of  a 
synthesis  of  the  human  with  the  divine  character.  That 
God  should  phenomenalize  himself  by  taking  on  at  some 
point  in  space  and  time  the  form  of  a  human  manifesta- 
tion is  an  idea  not  foreign  to  religious  thought,  nor  lying 
outside  of  the  possibilities  which  the  religious  consciousness 
would  recognize.  Now,  the  logos  is  simply  this  synthesis 
ideally  completed  in  a  nature  that  has  not  ceased  to  be 
divine  in  taking  on  the  life  of  a  human.  It  is  clear  that 
this  if  achieved  at  any  point  in  history  would  be  the  ideal 
solution  of  the  problem  of  mediation. 


chap.  iv.  THE  RELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  471 

Historically,  this  mediating  tendency  would  be  likely 
to  embody  itself  in  two  materially  different  forms.  Bear- 
ing in  mind  that  we  have  found  reason  for  thinking  that 
the  monotheistic  and  polytheistic  movements  were  largely 
parallel  and  conflicting,  we  shall  be  prepared  to  find  the 
need  of  mediation  met  in  two  very  different  ways.  On 
the  side  of  monotheism  it  would  be  met  occasionally  by  the 
angel  or  heavenly  messenger  of  the  deity,  but  ordinarily 
by  the  earthly  prophet  who  would  become  a  channel  of 
communication  between  the  deity  and  his  people.  Where- 
ever  monotheism  dominated  the  religious  conceptions  of 
the  people,  or  wherever  the  appeal  was  to  these  mono- 
theistic conceptions,  the  mediation  would  be  likely  to  take 
this  form.  But  the  need  would  be  felt  on  the  side  of 
polytheism  also  and  would  be  responded  to  in  the  poly- 
theistic   way    and    perhaps    in    a    very    unethical    spirit. 

(1)  In  the  practice  of  the  greater  deities  of  assuming 
various  mortal  shapes  in  order  to  come  into  those  special 
relations  wTith  men  necessary  to  carry  out  their  purposes, 

(2)  in  the  scales  of  intermediate  beings  that  would  be  con- 
ceived in  order  to  enable  the  gods  and  men  to  come  into 
more  familiar  intercourse.  This  scale  of  intermediates 
may  be  said,  of  course,  to  be  a  product  of  the  later  Alex- 
andrian Greek  imagination.  But  the  same  tendency  would 
manifest  itself  earlier  and  more  grossly  in  the  multiplica- 
tion of  deities  and  quasi-deities  as  in  fetichism  and  other 
forms  of  animism.  What  is  maintained  here  is  that  his- 
tory presents  two  sets  of  mediatorial  tendencies  instead  of 
one  and  that  the  inspiration  of  these  comes  from  different 
sources.  Moreover,  we  should  expect  historically  to  find 
that  only  those  movements  that  were  inspired  on  the 
monotheistic  side  would  go  on  to  their  completion  in  the 
idea  of  a  synthetic  nature,  divine  and  human ;  for  poly- 
theism is  already  disguised  humanism,  and  under  the 
stimulus  of  the  mediational  motive  would  tend  to  throw 
off  the  mask  and  become  purely  humanistic.  The  human- 
izing tendency  of  polytheism  would  therefore  lead  to  the 


472  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

eclipse  of  the  divine  and  the  degradation  of  religion  into 
pure  idolatry  and  superstition.  On  the  other  hand  this 
same  tendency,  when  proceeding  on  monotheistic  presup- 
positions and  guided  by  the  ethical  spirit  of  monotheism, 
would  tend  toward  the  meeting  of  a  real  requirement  of 
the  religious  consciousness,— the  mediation  of  some  "days- 
man" who  would  stand  as  a  relating  bond  between  God. 
and  the  human  soul.  The  dialectic  of  reflection  in  reach- 
ing this  result  on  the  monotheistic  side  may  be  represented 
as  follows:  The  first  act  of  religious  reflection  postulates 
God  as  transcendent.  But  in  postulating  him  as  tran- 
scendent we  virtually  put  him  away  off  in  the  heavens  and 
cut  ourselves  off  from  living  relations  with  him.  This 
leads  as  a  second  step  in  reflection,  to  the  demand  for  a 
human  mediator,  a  man  who  as  prophet  or  seer  shall  become 
the  channel  of  inter-communication  between  God  and  man. 
But  this  second  step  gives  rise  to  a  dilemma  which  will 
rise  to  consciousness,  practically,  when  the  people  have  been 
deceived  by  some  false  prophet,  or  when  they  begin  to  pay 
divine  honors  to  the  prophet  himself.  Logically,  it  will 
arise  when  it  is  seen  that  the  proposed  mediation  is  no 
solution  but  leaves  the  elements  still  apart  and  subject  to 
accident.  The  third  and  synthetic  step  of  reflection  is 
taken  when  the  dualism  between  the  divine  and  the  human 
is  virtually  denied  and  a  unitary  conception  reached, 
not  on  the  basis  of  identity,  but  on  that  of  synthesis,  by 
virtue  of  which  the  divine  becomes  human  not  by  any 
disrobing  of  the  vestments  of  divinity,  but  by  the  inter- 
penetration  of  the  divine  and  the  human  in  one  conscious 
experience. 

Partly  identical  with  the  problem  of  mediation,  but  to 
a  great  extent  distinct,  another  problem  in  the  meta- 
physics of  religion  would  arise  in  connection  with  pan- 
theistic tendencies  and  beliefs.  Pantheism  may  arise  as 
an  alternative  to  either  theism  or  polytheism.  If  we 
define  theism  as  the  theory  of  one,  personalized  deity,  and 
polytheism    as   the    theory   of   a   plurality   of   humanized 


chap.  vi.  THE  KELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  473 

deities,  we  may  then  define  pantheism  in  terms  of  its  rela- 
tion to  each.  As  related  to  theism,  pantheism  will  be  the 
theory  of  the  one  depersonalized  deity,  while  in  relation 
to  polytheism  it  will  be  that  of  the  all-deity  as  dis- 
tinguished from  the  many.  Historically,  we  should  expect 
to  see  pantheism  develop  along  both  of  these  lines,  giving 
rise  on  the  one  hand  to  the  community  of  gods  on  the  Greek 
Olympus,  and  the  pantheon  of  deities  at  Rome.  Panthe- 
ism would  arise  among  the  polytheistic  peoples,  partly 
from  a  genuine  instinct  for  unity  as  among  the  Greeks,  and 
partly  from  an  aggregation  of  different  national  religions 
under  one  control  as  at  Rome.  But  in  all  cases  there  would 
be  present  the  motive  of  impatience  with  pluralism  and 
the  desire  to  reach  some  system  of  grouping  which  would 
represent  a  possible  modus  vivendi  in  such  a  rout  of  deities. 
The  pantheism  which  grows  out  of  polytheism  is  at  best  a 
kind  of  collectivism  representing  federation  rather  than 
identification.  The  deeper  pantheistic  tendency  is  to  seek 
rather  on  the  monotheistic  side  where,  as  among  the 
Greeks,  reflection  early  extricated  itself  from  the  plural- 
ism of  the  Greek  popular  religion  and  worked  out  a 
religious  conception  of  its  own,  historically  related  to 
the  older  and  more  monotheistic  conceptions,  but  logic- 
ally responding  to  the  speculative  demand  for  a  unitary 
theory  of  the  world.  The  Greek  monotheist  was  one  who 
early  broke  with  polytheism  and  found  his  historical  start- 
ing-point in  older  religious  conceptions.  Now,  turning  to 
the  Orient,  which  is  the  native  heath  of  pantheism,  we  find 
that  the  Indian  pantheist  early  broke  with  the  polytheistic 
tendencies  of  Vedic  religion.  To  what  extent  he  found 
a  historical  point  of  departure  in  older  and  more  mono- 
theistic forms  of  religious  ideas,  is  somewhat  debatable. 
The  fact  of  the  early  breach  with  polytheism  is  not  in 
debate,  however.  Most  of  the  existing  religions  of  India 
refer  back  to  a  speculative  basis  in  some  philosophy  which 
preceded   them    and   which   either   constitutes   their   back- 


474  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

ground,  as  in  Buddhism,  or  their  more  positive  founda- 
tion as  in  the  Brahmanistic  creeds. 

Moreover,  not  without  suggestion  are  the  different 
points  of  departure  of  Greek  and  Indian  thought  in  refer- 
ence to  the  same  problem.  The  Greek  Xenophanes,  who 
may  be  taken  as  representative,  combats  the  pluralistic 
tendencies  of  the  current  religion  by  striking  directly  at  its 
anthropomorphism.  'Your  gods  are  magnified  men.  If 
you  were  oxen,  they  would  be  magnified  oxen.  The  gods 
have  not  the  bodily  parts  of  men.'  This  he  ridicules  un- 
sparingly. Then,  to  enforce  his  anti-humanism,  he  strikes 
at  the  pluralism  in  a  way  that  cuts  up  the  principle  of 
anthropomorphism  by  the  roots.  '  God  is  all  eye.  He  is  all 
thought.  His  plurality  is  only  apparent.  The  essence  of 
his  nature  is  his  oneness,  his  being  all-present  in  any  of  his 
manifestations.'  Whether  Xenophanes  was  an  out  and  out 
pantheist  or  not,  and  history  does  not  sufficiently  inform 
us  on  that  point,  he  at  least  defined  the  principle  of  pan- 
theism, the  principle  that  in  the  later  Greek-Oriental 
thought  developed  into  the  concept  of  a  being  who  tran- 
scends all  personal  attributes  and  can  be  only  negatively 
conceived.  The  negative  theology  of  Pseudo-Dionysius  is 
an  early  example.  Later  this  same  principle  embodied  itself 
in  that  classic  of  western  pantheism,  Spinoza's  Ethics,  in 
which  the  notion  of  a  depersonalized  deity  is  carried  to  its 
logical  goal.  Turning  to  the  Indian  movement  we  find  that 
it  proceeds  in  a  way  that  is  characteristically  different.  It 
is  the  pluralism  and  not  the  anthropomorphism  that  the  In- 
dian hates.  He  has  no  moral  indignation  against  represent- 
ing the  gods  as  horses,  cows,  or  even  as  cats  and  serpents. 
But  he  does  hate  the  pluralism  which  is  irrational,  and 
seeks  to  reach  a  unitary  conception  which  will  transcend  the 
mutability  of  the  current  beliefs.  The  Indian  sage  who 
has  thought  himself  clear  on  this  point  is  represented  as 
carrying  on  a  Socratic  investigation  with  some  pupil. 
His  method  is  to  take  some  concrete  example  and  analyze  it 
down  to  the  abstract  existential  element  which  it  contains  or 


chap.  vi.  THE  KELIG10US  SYNTHESIS.  475 

presupposes,  and  which  stands  for  simple  being  in  the 
various  situations.  And  having  led  his  pupil  to  see  this 
point  of  being  or  existence,  the  whole  burden  of  his  teaching 
is  embodied  in  the  iterated  "That  art  Thou.''''  In  short, 
while  western  pantheism  is  achieved  by  depersonalizing 
the  deity,  the  same  or  a  corresponding  goal  is  reached 
in  Indian  thought  by  depersonalizing  the  self.  The  Indian 
wisdom  says  to  you,  'Depersonalize  thyself  and  thou  art' 
being  or  existence.'  The  depersonalized  self  is  the  deity. 
The  logical  result  of  the  two  methods  is  two  different 
types  of  pantheism;  the  Hellenic  which  is  not  pure 
since  the  depersonalization  is  never  completely  carried  out, 
and  which  tends,  therefore,  constantly  to  lapse  into  theism 
or  polytheism;  and  the  Indian  which  is  pure  inasmuch  as 
it  sets  out  with  the  depersonalization  of  the  thinker  himself. 
It  is  only  in  the  Indian  type  of  pantheism,  then,  that  we 
find  the  real,  pure  alternative  to  theism.  If,  then,  we  be 
monotheists  rather  than  polytheists,  there  are,  in  the  last 
analysis,  these  two  alternatives  open  to  us,— theism,  the  doc- 
trine of  a  personalized  deity,  or  Hindu  pantheism,  the 
doctrine  of  a  depersonalized  self. 

This  alternative  brings  to  light  the  dialectic  of  reflec- 
tion which  is  logically  involved  in  the  issue  between  theism 
and  pantheism.  Bearing  in  mind  the  unethical  char- 
acter of  pantheism,  in  connection  with  the  fact  that  it 
is  more  closely  affiliated  with  monotheism  than  with  poly- 
theism, we  might  seem  here  to  have  developed  a  kind  of 
inconsistency,  since  it  has  been  maintained  that  mono- 
theism is  the  ethical  branch  of  religion.  The  difficulty  will 
disappear,  however,  if  we  succeed  in  seizing  the  real  ques- 
tion of  the  dialectic.  This  is  not  primarily  whether  the  deity 
shall  be  regarded  as  personal  or  not,  but  rather  whether 
personality  itself  be  a  reality  or  an  illusion ;  and  as  the 
oriental  thought  tends  to  reduce  everything  to  process,  the 
question  is  whether  the  personalizing  process  be  one  of 
realization  or  illusion.  Now,  the  personalizing  process 
holds  in  it  also  the  ethical  moment,  and  this  will  be  denied 


476  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

if  personality  is  denied.  That  in  theism  the  reality  of  the 
personalizing  process  has  been  affirmed,  while  in  the  pan- 
theistic thinking  of  the  Indian  it  has  been  doubted  and 
denied,  seems  to  express  the  fundamental  difference  be- 
tween the  two  modes  of  reflection.  Indian  thought  re- 
gards the  process  of  depersonalization  as  the  way  to  real 
being  and  existence.  Having  determined  this,  its  method 
is  that  of  self-identification  with  this  real  being  or  exist- 
ence. Indian  thought  is  scarcely  ontological  at  all  in  the 
sense  of  postulating  anything  analogous  to  objective  sub- 
stance. It  sets  out  with  the  self  of  the  conscious  thinker 
who,  by  a  reflection  which  takes  the  form  of  disrobing  this 
self  of  all  its  personal  attributes,  identifies  the  sublimated 
remainder  with  the  real.  That  art  Thou.  And  this 
is  true  for  every  individual  thinker.  The  points  of 
reality  are  not  many,  but  one.  The  phenomenal  selves 
may  be  many,  but  the  real  self  is  one.  That  art  Thou, 
and  Thou  and  Thou. 

Now  in  theistic  reflection  this  process  is  reversed.  The 
first  movement  of  reflection  has  given,  let  us  say,  the  bare 
fact  of  a  transcendent  existent.  But  the  second  is  the  proc- 
ess of  its  personalization.  This  is  the  stage  that  meets  the  In- 
dian's  denial.  We  have,  then,  an  opposition  developed 
between  two  contradictory  modes  of  thinking,  the  one  affirm- 
ing what  the  other  denies  and  denying  what  the  other 
affirms.  The  Indian's  thought,  the  process  of  depersonali- 
zation, represents  the  way  of  illusion  to  the  theistic  thinker, 
while  the  theist's  thought,  the  process  of  personalization, 
represents  the  veil  of  Maya  to  the  Indian.  From  the  stand- 
point of  religious  thought  there  is  no  way  out  of  this  di- 
lemma. We  have  come  here  to  the  dividing  of  the  ways 
where  we  simply  have  our  choice  between  a  mode  of  thinking 
which  will  lead  on  logically  to  the  affirmation  of  the  reality 
of  a  personal  deity,  and  one  which  leads  to  the  denial  of  the 
reality  of  a  personal  self.  It  seems  clear  that  when  we  have 
come  down  to  a  difference  of  this  fundamentally  radical 
character,  our  dialectic  comes  to  an  end  and  we  are  left  to 


chap.  vi.  ,       THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  477 

choose  by  which  principle  of  world-interpretation  we  will 
abide.  This  choice  will,  of  course,  not  be  one  of  arbitrary 
will,  provided  it  be  rationally  made.  It  presents  an  issue 
analogous  to  that  which  arises  between  ultimate  rationality 
and  irrationality  where  the  thinker  finds  himself  forced  to 
face  a  dilemma  at  various  epochal  points  in  his  mental  his- 
tory. I  do  not  mean  that  this  is  precisely  an  issue  between 
the  ultimate  rational  and  irrational;  but  to  each  individual 
who  is  called  to  face  the  alternatives,  it  will  appear  to  be  such 
an  issue ;  for  while  we  may  suppose  that  the  choice  will  seem 
to  be  the  rational  one  to  the  chooser,  it  yet  remains  true  that 
the  alternatives  themselves  stand  at  least  for  two  irrecon- 
cilable and  wholly  contradictory  concepts  of  rationality. 

Among  the  metaphysical  problems  in  the  sphere  of 
religion  may  also  be  ranked  that  of  religious  knowledge. 
Is  there  a  knowledge  that  is  distinctively  religious,  and,  if 
so,  how  is  it  to  be  denned  ?  The  problem  of  religious  knowl- 
edge divides  naturally  into  two  questions,  the  first  pertain- 
ing to  the  existence  and  the  second  to  the  characterization 
of  the  object  of  religion.  On  the  question  of  existence  we 
are  not  about  to  enter  the  field  of  the  proofs  of  God's 
existence.  Our  problem  here  is  far  other.  Among  exist- 
ents  what  kind  of  a  being  is  God,  and  on  what  basis  of 
certitude  does  his  existence  rest.  In  the  first  place,  God  as 
the  object  of  religion  is  not  an  object  in  any  phenomenal 
sense.  Following  the  analysis  of  the  early  chapters,  he 
may  be  called  an  eject.  We  did  not  there  attempt  to 
determine  what  species  of  eject  God  is.  But  it  is  cer- 
tain that  if  he  be  known  at  all  as  an  objective  existent, 
it  must  be  indirectly  through  some  symbol,  and  that  the 
real  existent  will  be  ejective.  We  have  already  concluded 
that  God  is  not  given  immediately  in  an  intuition,  nor  yet 
as  the  object  of  an  immediate  spontaneous  inference.  He 
is  given  as  a  first  immediate  inference  of  reflection.  To 
change  the  phrasing,  God  is  affirmed  in  a  judgment  which 
embodies  the  first  immediate  inference  of  real  existence  on 
the  part  of  a  reflective  being. 


478  SYNTHESIS.  paet  II. 

The  existence  of  God  is  affirmed,  therefore  in  an 
immediate  reflective  inference  founded  on  the  unique 
phenomena  we  have  considered  in  another  place.  The 
second  step  will  be  one  of  characterization  and  that  will 
consist  in  the  personalizing  process  qualified  as  we  have 
shown  by  the  principle  of  transcendence,  resulting  in 
the  idea  of  God  as  a  transcendent  being  and  the  bearer  of 
an  eternal  consciousness,  but  yet  as  a  subject  of  attributes 
and  a  performer  of  functions  which  have  been  conceived 
after  the  analogies  of  our  own  personal  experience.  Let 
us  name  the  principle  of  this  entire  characterizing  activity, 
the  self -analogy  and  the  principle  on  which  the  eternal 
consciousness,  omniscience,  omnipotence,  et  al.,  are  ascribed 
to  him;  that  of  transcendence.  The  whole  process  of  char- 
acterization by  virtue  of  which  God  is  conceived  to  be  more 
than  an  unknown  x  will  thus  rest  on  the  two  principles 
of  self-analogy  and  transcendence;  and  the  fundamental 
question  of  knowledge  will  concern  the  validity  of  these 
principles.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  validity  of  these 
principles  outside  of  the  field  of  religion  is  acknowledged 
in  various  ways.  As  regards  transcendence,  this  is  ac- 
knowledged wherever  real  objective  existence  is  affimed; 
that  is,  in  the  case  of  all  ejects.  But  even  the  idealist  who 
carries  his  principles  so  far  as  to  deny  all  ejects,  or  at  least 
that  we  can  affirm  them  as  real,  will  still  recognize  the 
transcendent  in  some  form.  If  he  does  not  recognize  it 
as  we  have  done  in  these  discussions  in  the  final  reference 
of  all  processes  of  the  relative  and  phenomenal  to  meta- 
physical grounds,  upon  which  their  rationality  ultimately 
depends,  he  will  recognize  it,  like  Mr.  Spencer,  in  the 
assertion  of  reality,  the  nature  of  which  is  wholly  be- 
yond our  power  to  determine  or  even  to  conceive.  Tran- 
scendence in  some  form  will  force  itself  on  every  form 
of  theory  except  that  of  pure  phenomenalism.  But  pure 
phenomenalism  is  itself  the  denial  of  transcendence  and 
must  make  its  claim  good.  If  pure  phenomenalism  be 
the  true  theory,  why  should  there  be  existents  that  lie  be- 


chap.  vi.  THE  KELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  479 

yond  our  ken,  and  if  ejects  be  given  up,  why  do  we  any 
longer  distinguish  between  ourselves  and  other  beings? 
And  if  we  concede  these  other  beings  as  pure  projections 
of  ourselves  upon  an  empty  background,  why  are  we  phe- 
nomenalists  at  all?  In  a  world  of  pure  appearance,  the 
appearance  becomes  the  absolutely  real  and  the  pure  phe- 
nomenalist  is  the  absolutist.  Why,  then,  should  he  need 
science?  Fact  is  absolute  and  to  go  farther  would,  to  use 
Lotze's  phrase,  be  like  'going  behind  being  to  see  what  it  is 
made  of. '  We  must  either  admit  transcendence  or  we  must 
abnegate  science  and  become  mental  quietists. 

Just  as  true  is  it  that  outside  of  religion  the  validity 
of  the  principle  of  self-analogy  is  recognized.  If  we 
recognize  ejects  at  all  we  depend  on  this  principle  for 
characterization.  If  we  recognize  ejects  as  Mr.  Spencer 
does  and  deny  the  validity  of  self-analogy,  we  find  our- 
selves forever  affirming  bare  existence  without  the  ability 
to  go  farther.  In  fact,  we  find  ourselves  hopelessly  im- 
paled on  the  bare  point  of  abstract  affirmation.  The  only 
consistent  denial  of  self-analogy  is  that  of  the  Indian 
pantheist,  who  reduces  consciousness  down  to  the  point  of 
bare  abstract  existence.  But  beyond  the  last  affirmation, 
—the  "That  art  Thou,"— there  is  nothing  further  to  be 
said.  The  Indian  accepts  the  logic  of  his  situation,  which 
is  that  of  eternal  quietism.  The  logic  of  pure  phenomen- 
alism and  that  of  its  absolute  denial,  Indian  pantheism, 
thus  come  together  and  are  identical.  We  have  one  choice, 
then,  between  absolute  quietism  in  which  nothing  happens 
and  nothing  can  be  affirmed,  and  an  attitude  for  which 
something  may  eventuate  and  for  which  science  is  possible. 
Let  it  be  understood  here  that  we  are  not  refuting  either 
pure  phenomenalism  or  Indian  pantheism.  They  stand 
as  possible  alternatives  of  thinking.  We  only  point  out 
the  fact  that  they  are  logically  impossible  to  any  one  who 
thinks  that  anything  can  be  made  out  of  either  discussion 
or    investigation.      To    the    pure    phenomenalist    and   the 


480 


SYNTHESIS. 


PART  II. 


Indian  pantheist,  truth  is  a  bare  abstraction  and  we  can 
afford  to  leave  them  alone  in  that  conviction. 

We  may  assume  the  validity  of  the  principles  of  tran- 
scendence and  self-analogy  outside  of  religion  without 
further  parley.  If  truth  be  not  a  present  possession,  then 
research,  learning,  science,  are  necessary  and  the  prin- 
ciples must  stand.  Now  when  we  enter  the  field  of  re- 
ligious ideas  we  find  that  the  thought  which  follows  the 
Hellenic  rather  than  the  Indian  tradition  and  doctrines 
in  science,  has  manifested  two  diametrically  opposite 
tendencies;  the  one  denying  the  self -analogy  and  tending 
toward  nescience,  the  other  denying  transcendence  and 
tending  toward  omniscience.  Let  us  designate  the  two 
forms  of  tendency  agnosticism  and  gnosticism.  Agnos- 
ticism, so  far  as  we  are  concerned  with  it  here,  arises  out  of 
the  simultaneous  affirmation  of  ejective  existence  and 
denial  of  the  validity  of  self-analogy  as  a  principle  of 
characterization.  We  thus  find  Kant  and  Spencer  and,  in 
some  of  his  moods,  Huxley,  asserting  the  eject  in  the  form 
of  things  in  themselves,  or  ultimate  powers,  while  at  the 
same  time  denying  the  only  principle  by  which  ejects  can 
be  intelligently  conceived.  The  logic  of  this  situation  is, 
of  course,  that  of  the  Indian,  but  the  agnostic  loses  his 
nerve  and  draws  back  at  the  last  step.  Instead  of  accept- 
ing the  logic  of  the  situation  and  lapsing  into  quietistic 
calm,  he  breaks  into  a  quaver  of  doubt  and  is  forever 
tossed  back  and  forth  between  the  horns  of  affirmation 
and  negation  without  the  ability  to  get  any  certain  hold 
on  either.  I  say  the  characteristic  agnostic  position 
represents  a  loss  of  nerve  more  than  anything  else,  since 
the  denial  of  the  self -analogy  with  which  it  sets  out  ought 
logically  to  lead  to  absolute  quietism.  But  the  agnostic 
clings  to  the  straw  of  a  possible  alternative  and  he  wishes 
to  save  science.  Hinc  illae  lachrymae.  Gnosticism,  on  the 
contrary,  is  a  more  robust  growth,  since  it  is  at  least  sure 
of  its  own  mind.  The  form  of  gnosticism  in  which  we  are 
here  interested  is  the  species  that  denies  transcendence  and 


chap.  vi.  THE  RELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  481 

professes  to  include  the  absolute  under  definite  categories 
of  thought.  This  has  been  the  dream  of  modern  rational- 
ism from  Descartes  to  Hegel.  That  the  real  is  the  con- 
ceivable and  that  its  absoluteness  culminates  at  the  point 
of  clearest  and  most  definite  conception  is  the  inner  essence 
of  this  modern  gnostic  movement.  Now,  we  cannot  lay 
any  charge  of  weakness  at  the  door  of  modern  gnosticism. 
On  the  contrary,  it  is  the  most  robust  kind  of  dogmatism. 
But  there  is  one  last  insight  which  it  lacks.  It  does  not 
see  that  to  deny  transcendence  is  to  affirm  the  truth  of  pure 
phenomenalism  which  it  regards  as  its  opposite.  Let  us 
see  how  this  is.  Pure  phenomenalism  denies  the  distinc- 
tion between  reality  and  appearance  and  makes  the  appear- 
ance the  real.  The  real  mistake  that  is  committed  here  is 
not  so  much  a  wrong  judgment  regarding  the  nature  of  the 
real  as  it  is  an  effort  to  get  on  with  a  one-term  reality.  The 
suppression  of  distinction  is  the  suppression  of  movement, 
and  this  means  death.  A  real  that  was  purely  transcendent 
would  not  only  be  inaccessible ;  it  would  be  dead.  On  the 
other  hand,  a  real  that  is  wholly  contained  and  subsumed 
under  defining  concepts  has,  by  virtue  of  that  fact,  become 
completely  phenomenalized.  The  truth  is,  then,  a  present 
possession  and  absolute  quietism  the  logical  outcome. 

It  may  be  taken,  then,  as  capable  of  demonstration  that 
neither  agnosticism  nor  gnosticism  are  logically  tenable, 
but  that  each  moves  directly  toward  a  logical  goal  which 
it  abhors.  Now,  we  have  found  these  principles  behaving 
so  much  like  abstractions  when  either  has  been  elevated 
into  an  absolute  that  we  are  prepared  to  regard  them  as 
abstractions  when  so  used  and  as  only  having  value  for 
reality  when  employed  in  a  concrete  synthesis.  This  seems 
to  be  the  lesson  of  our  modern  thinking  in  most  fields;  it 
has  been  too  abstract  and  fragmentary,— too  much  dis- 
posed to  put  asunder  what  God  has  joined  together.  And 
if  we  apply  this  lesson  in  the  sphere  of  religious  ideas  it 
will  only  be  what  we  have  been  finding  it  necessary  to  do 
in  every  other  sphere  where  reflection  enters.  If,  then,  we 
31 


482  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

define  the  principle  of  transcendence  as  (1)  a  principle  of 
existence  by  virtue  of  which  the  real  existent  apart  from 
ourselves  is  affirmed  as  an  eject,  (2)  in  relation  to  char- 
acterization, as  the  principle  of  infinitation  by  virtue  of 
which  the  whole  characterization  of  the  deity  is  tran- 
scendentalized,  so  to  speak,  and  all  his  attributes  rep- 
resented as  commensurate  with  the  eternal  consciousness 
which  we  find  it  necessary  to  ascribe  to  him,  it  will  be 
found  that  we  are  asserting  a  principle  which,  if  applied 
abstractly,  that  is,  without  reference  to  the  self -analogy, 
would  have  no  content  at  all  except  the  mere  fact  of  tran- 
scendence itself.  This  we  could  develop  into  certain  nega- 
tive conceptions  like  the  Hamiltonian  infinite  or  absolute, 
that  would  represent  simply  the  negation  of  the  positively 
conceivable  and,  therefore,  of  conceivable  content.  Our 
category  of  transcendence  would  thus  remain  empty  of 
content  with  the  exception  of  the. bare  existent  with  which 
it  starts.  We  do  not  need  to  repeat  the  logic  of  such  a 
situation  or  to  argue  any  further  that  its  real  goal  is  much 
more  radical  than  that  which  the  agnostic  contemplates. 

Again,  if  we  define  the  principle  of  self-analogy  as  that 
of  the  personalization  of  its  object,  the  object  being  given,  it 
will  be  clear  that  this  is  the  principle  and  the  only  one  by 
which  the  given  ejective  existent  can  obtain  any  char- 
acterizing content.  We  could  not  without  it  reach  the 
notion  of  even  the  transcendent  attributes,— that  of  eternal 
consciousness,  omniscience  and  omnipotence,  for  -example. 
Nothing  but  the  pure  emptiness  of  the  negative  attributes 
would  be  possible.  But  let  us  suppose  an  unqualified  appli: 
cation  of  this  principle  to  the  object  of  religion.  The 
result  would  be  pure  anthropomorphism,  a  complete  sup- 
pression of  transcendence  and  the  conception  of  the  deity 
as  possibly  a  "magnified,"  but  certainly  not  a  "non- 
natural,"  man.  The  unqualified  application  of  the  self- 
analogy  would  result  in  pure  humanism  without  a  trace 
of  transcendence  and  thus  in  the  total  suppression  of 
religion  itself.     If,  however,  we  recognize  these  principles 


chap.  VI.  THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  483 

as  parts  of  a  living  synthesis  that  is  not  to  be  broken,  we 
shall  find  that  the  results  will  be  in  every  way  more  rational. 
Wherever  there  is  a  living  synthesis  of  this  species,  involv- 
ing the  operation  of  forces  that  in  their  abstraction  are 
mutually   contradictory,    it   will   be   found   that   the   real 
movement  takes  the  form  of  a  dialectic  and  the  object  here 
is  to  trace  the  stages  by  which  this  movement  is  realized. 
Let  us  suppose  that  religion  originates,  as  we  have  repre- 
sented it,  in  the  conscious  effort  of  some  proto-human  genius, 
who  has  been  awakened  to  reflection  by  some  stupendous 
or  appalling  natural  phenomenon,  to  apprehend  and  char- 
acterize his  object.     We  have  in  this  first  experience,  in  the 
affirmation  of  existence,  also  the  germ  of  transcendence. 
We  have  supposed  the  cause  of  the  religious  awakening 
into  reflection  to  be  necessarily  super  ordinary ;  for  it  is 
difficult  to  find  in  the  ordinary  the  motive  for  an  extraor- 
dinary experience  or  advance.     Using  the  terms  of  evolution, 
we  have  said  that  his  first  step  in  religion  would  be  a  unique 
variation   that   contained   in  it  the   germs   of  the   super- 
ordinary.     Think  of  it,  and  say  how  else  it  could  originate. 
Mr.  Spencer  weakens  his  theory  of  origin  by  seeking  in  the 
ordinary,— that  is,  in  dreams  of  living  or  dead  humans,— 
for  a  point  of  transcendence  that  is  not  there.    Once  given  the 
point  of  transcendence,   and   one   can   see   how   it  might 
coalesce  with  the  dream-experience  and  qualify  it  for  some 
of  the  effects  Mr.   Spencer  ascribes  to  it.     The  dialectic 
involved  in  the  origin  of  the  notion  of  the  deity  would  be, 
first,  this  objective  shock  out  of  which  would  result  the 
first  movement ;  the  emergence  of  the  transcendent  x,  for  it 
would  be  otherwise  undetermined.     But  the  principle  of 
the  characterization  of  ejects  is  self -analogy  and  this  would 
operate,  however  vaguely  and  crudely,  in  the  direction  of 
personalizing  the  object.     Out  of  this  effort  of  personaliza- 
tion would  arise,  in  turn,  a  reactionary  reflection  motived 
by  the  feeling  of  transcendence  which  the  object  had  in- 
spired.    Moved  by  it  the  primitive  man  would  not  be  able 
to  carry  his  anthropomorphism  so  far  as  to  conceive  the 


484 


SYNTHESIS. 


PART  II. 


deity  as  a  being  altogether  like  himself.  The  opposition  of 
tendencies  in  his  mind  would,  however,  lead  to  an  accommo- 
dation, to  a  higher  synthesis  from  which  doubtless  some 
of  the  lowest  human  elements  would  be  purged  out,  while 
those  that  remained  and  were  ascribed  to  the  deity  would 
be  touched,  as  it  were,  with  the  sense  of  transcendence. 
They  would  be  magnified  and  enriched  in  content  so  as  to 
be  in  some  way  commensurate  with  the  ultra-human  cause  of 
the  religious  phenomena.  Thus  would  arise  the  first  step 
of  that  i it fini fating  process  by  which  the  two  dialectical 
principles  would  alternately  pass  through  the  moments  of 
opposition  and  coalescence. 

We  have  represented  the  stages  of  the  dialectical  move- 
ment in  which  the  two  principles  come  together  in  mutual 
qualification.  "We  have  only  to  consider  the  working  out  of 
this  dialectical  movement  subjectively,  in  the  reflective 
consciousness,  and  objectively,  on  the  page  of  history,  in 
order  to  be  convinced  that  it  embodies  the  true  course  of 
religious  knowledge  and  progress.  Subjectively  the  prog- 
ress would  be  marked,  in  one  way,  by  the  greater  emphasis 
that  is  put  on  the  transcendence  of  the  deity  and  the  con- 
sequent widening  of  the  distance  between  the  divine  and 
the  human.  This  would  be  accompanied  by  clearer  con- 
ceptions of  the  respects  in  which  the  notion  of  the  deity 
negates  that  of  man,  and  by  the  tendency  in  characteriza- 
tion to  put  the  greater  stress  on  such  attributes  as  eternity, 
omniscience  and  omnipotence.  We  have  only  to  compare 
the  conceptions  of  the  Christian  child  with  those  of  the 
same  child  when  perchance  it  has  become  a  Christian 
philosopher  in  order  to  realize  the  vast  development  on  the 
side  of  the  divine  transcendence  that  has  taken  place. 
But  this  development  of  the  sense  and  ideas  of  tran- 
scendence would  not  be  the  only  aspect  of  subjective 
development.  The  Christian  philosopher  would  have  also 
passed  through  an  evolution  on  the  side  of  the  principle  of 
self -analogy.  The  child  makes  a  short  cut  in  the  use  of 
this  principle,  carrying  bodily  over  to  the  deity  the  per- 


chap.  vi.  THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  485 

sonality  of  some  good  man  in  whom  it  has  absolute  con- 
fidence ;  perhaps  that  of  its  father  or  teacher.  The  child 's 
notion,  though  pure  and  elevated  from  the  human  point  of 
view,  will  no  doubt  be  somewhat  crudely  anthropomorphic, 
and  the  Christian  philosopher,  on  looking  back  along  the 
line  of  his  experience,  will  find  that  a  gradual  modification 
has  taken  place,— some  of  the  features  of  the  child-idea  will 
have  disappeared  wholly,  leaving  no  traces.  This  will 
have  happened  to  the  whole  corporal  part  which  will  have 
dropped  out  and  God  will  be  conceived  as  a  spirit.  Again, 
the  philosopher  will  have  learned  to  distinguish  between 
caprice  and  rationality  in  the  sphere  of  conduct  and  will; 
as  well  as  between  feelings  that  are  largely  physiological 
and  the  higher  and  more  spiritualized  emotions.  Intel- 
lectually, he  will  also  have  learned  to  distinguish  ordinary 
cognition  in  space  and  time  from  a  kind  of  knowledge  that 
concerns  the  whole,  and  it  will  be  the  thoughts  of  the  latter 
that  he  will  ascribe  to  the  divine.  There  will  be  no  quarter 
of  the  personalizing  activity  that  will  not  have  been  modified, 
and  the  Christian  philosopher,  while  feeling  that  the  being 
he  worships  is  objectively  the  same  being  that  received  his 
worship  when  a  child,  will  recognize  that  subjectively  there 
has  been  a  great  change  in  his  mode  of  characterizing  him. 
He  has  not  dropped  the  self-analogy,  but  this  analogy  has 
been  purged  of  its  physical  and  its  purely  anthropomorphic 
elements,  and  the  self  that  is  taken  as  the  type  of  charac- 
terization will  be  the  highest  ideal  of  selfhood  he  is  able  to 
conceive.  Even  when  he  has  thus  idealized  the  self-type, 
or  "copy,"  as  the  genetic  psychologist  would  call  it,  he  is 
conscious  of  further  modifying  this  type  by  his  sense  of 
transcendence,  so  that  no  thought,  emotion,  purpose  or 
volition  of  the  deny  can  be  said  to  be  altogether  like  the 
corresponding  mentations  of  the  idealized  self.  But  the 
whole  trend  of  his  subjective  development  will  have  been  in 
the  direction  of  a  more  rational  because  a  more  intelligent, 
conception  of  the  deity.  And  this,  while  it  will  doubtless 
take  away  some  of  the  close  intimacy  and  familiarity  of  the 


486  SYNTHESIS.  Part  n. 

child's  relation  to  its  God,  will  replace  it  with  a  type  of 
personal  relation  that  will  be  both  more  intimate  and  more 
highly  spiritualized.  Paul  spake  as  a  Christian  philoso- 
pher, not  as  a  child,  when  he  propounded  that  closest  of  all 
formulas  of  intimacy,  ' '  In  Him  we  live  and  move  and  have 
our  being." 

Not  only  subjectively  is  this  true  of  religious  experi- 
ence, but  we  shall  find  it  the  most  effective  of  all  prin- 
ciples in  the  interpretation  of  the  historical  movements 
of  religion.  Mr.  Spencer  conceives  the  process  of  de- 
velopment in  the  sphere  of  religious  ideas  to  be  that  of 
deanthropomorphization.  But  that  he  represents  this  one- 
sidedly  and  abstractly  is  what  we  maintain  here.  The 
law  of  deanthropomorphization  is  simply  that  of  pure 
transcendence  on  its  negative  dissolving  side.  We  have 
seen  that,  historically,  the  principles  of  transcendence  and 
personalization  sprang  from  distinct  roots  which  may  be 
separated  in  the  actual  movements  of  religious  develop- 
ment. To  speak  more  specifically,  the  principle  of  tran- 
scendence may  associate  itself  with  one  line  of  religious 
evolution  more  definitely  than  with  another,  while  that  of 
personalization  may  be  more  definitely  associated  with  the 
lines  that  are  least  influenced  by  the  principle  of  tran- 
scendence. Historically,  I  think  we  shall  find  this  to  be 
what  has  actually  taken  place.  We  have  seen  that  mono- 
theism and  polytheism  represent  two  distinct  and  largely 
parallel  developments,  polytheism  arising  out  of  distinct- 
ively animistic  roots,  while  monotheism  springs  more 
directly  from  the  earlier  and  objective  side  of  religion. 
We  should  naturally  expect,  then,  that  the  principle  of 
transcendence  would  be  more  effective  along  the  line  of  the 
objective  monotheistic  development,  while  the  principle  of 
personalization  would  be  likely  to  dominate  the  polytheistic 
movement.  At  least  two  abstract  movements  would  then 
arise  which  would  require  to  be  distinguished  from  the  con- 
crete movements  of  the  dialectic  itself.  One  of  these  would 
be  an  extreme  monotheistic  movement  in  the  direction  of 


chap.  \  I.  THE  EELIGIOUS  SYNTHESIS.  487 

monotheistic  pantheism.  This  movement  would  exemplify 
the  abstract  principle  of  transcendence.  The  other  and 
diametrically  opposite  would  be  an  unlimited  and  un- 
bridled pluralistic  movement  in  the  direction  of  pure 
polytheistic  individualism.  Monotheistic  pantheism  and 
polytheistic  individualism  thus  represent  abstract  religious 
movements  at  diametrically  opposite  points  of  the  compass. 
Now,  it  is  not  to  these  extreme  tendencies  we  are 
to  look  for  the  operation  of  the  real  law  of  religious  evo- 
lution, but  rather  to  those  more  measured  movements  in 
which  the  alternation  of  opposite  tendencies  may  be  detected. 
Thus  if  we  take  the  history  of  Judaism  from  Moses  to  the 
end  of  the  old  dispensation,  it  may  be  said  that  the  Mosaic 
legislation  was  the  re-establishment  on  a  higher  plane,  and 
with  more  elaborate  ceremonials,  of  the  old  monotheistic 
worship  of  Abraham  which  for  various  reasons  had  fallen 
into  decline.  The  subsequent  history  of  the  Hebrew  race 
was  made  up  of  a  long  alternation  of  struggles  between  the 
pure  monotheism  of  the  transcendent  Jehovah  and  the 
polytheizing  tendencies  of  the  animistic  religions  with  which 
it  came  into  contact.  The  result  of  these  struggles  was  a 
checkered  history  by  which  the  tribes,  after  a  partial  and, 
in  some  cases  almost  total,  apostasy,  would  be  recalled  to 
their  allegiance  by  the  continued  influence  of  their  own  mis- 
fortunes and  the  teaching  of  some  prophet  who  would  arise 
for  the  emergency.  These  restorations,  however,  also  rep- 
resented advances  and  in  very  special  directions,  and  while 
the  transcendence  of  the  deity  asserted  itself  more  strongly 
against  the  influence  of  polytheism,  so  that  the  temptation 
to  polytheism  gradually  ceased  to  exist,  there  was  a  parallel 
movement  in  the  direction  of  the  purification  rather  than 
the  suppression  of  the  personalizing  tendency  itself.  This 
is  seen  in  the  gradual  but  sure  moralization  of  the  people, 
so  that  the  degrading  rites  and  superstitions  connected  with 
the  worship  of  the  polytheistic  gods  lost  much  of  their 
power.  That  this  was  a  purification  rather  than  a  suppres- 
sion of  the  personalizing  tendency  is  shown  by  the  fact  that 


488  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

the  idea  of  Jehovah,  as  expressed  by  the  later  prophets,  was 
one  that,  while  preserving  the  essentials  of  the  older  con- 
ceptions, qualified  them  with  many  of  the  gentler  and  more 
social  traits  of  character.  While,  therefore,  Jehovah  still 
remained  the  God  of  righteousness,  he  also  began  to  mani- 
fest in  a  more  pronounced  manner  the  traits  of  love  and 
peace  and  gentleness.  The  development  is  thus  what  would 
be  expected  from  a  movement  in  which  the  results  were 
being  influenced  by  the  opposite  principles  of  a  dialectic. 

The  limit  of  this  chapter  has  been  reached  and  we  can 
onJy  say  in  concluding  it  that  wherever  the  fortunes  of 
religion  can  be  definitely  traced,  our  belief  is  that  Mr. 
Spencer's  law  of  deanthropomorphization,  in  all  cases  where 
it  operates  toward  the  distinct  suppression  of  the  personal- 
izing tendency,  will  be  found  to  be  the  law  of  a  decadent 
movement ;  whereas,  in  all  movements  that  have  been 
clearly  in  the  direction  of  religious  progress  and  of  more 
elevated  religious  conceptions,  it  will  be  found  that  the 
operation  of  this  law  has  been  qualified  by  some  force  of  a 
different  kind,  working  in  such  a  way  as  to  bring  about 
a  more  purified  and  elevated  form  of  personalization  rather 
than  its  suppression.  This  is  what  we  should  expect  if  the 
real  movement  were  a  dialectic  of  opposing  principles. 
We  conclude,  then,  that  the  real  law  of  religious  evolution 
is  not  that  of  abstract  deanthropomorphization,  which 
tends  to  the  suppression  of  the  personalizing  tendency. 
Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  is  it  the  law  of  unqualified  per- 
sonalization tending  toward  the  complete  humanization  of 
the  deity.  These  are  the  laws  of  abstract  tendencies  and 
represent  extremes,  while  the  measured  movements  which 
represent  real  progress  are  determined  by  the  alternating 
dialectic  of  the  forces  of  personification  and  transcendence 
in  interaction. 


CHAPTER  VII. 

PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS. 

In  the  preceding  chapter  we  have  stated  and  illustrated 
what  we  conceive  to  be  the  true  law  of  development  in  the 
sphere  of  religious  ideas  and  conceptions.  This  law  is  the 
expression  of  a  dialectic  movement  in  which  the  operative 
forces  are  the  principles  of  self-analogy  and  transcendence. 
In  the  light  of  this  law  we  were  able  to  determine  that  dean- 
thropomorphization  is  only  the  negative  aspect  of  a  process 
which  on  its  positive  side  takes  the  form  of  a  more  elevated 
and  purified  use  of  the  principle  of  personalization.  Now 
this  law  holds  in  it  the  historical  evolution  because  it  is 
primarily  a  law  of  religious  reflection.  The  thoughts  of 
men  in  their  effort  to  intelligently  apprehend  such  a  being 
as  God  find  themselves  passing  through  the  stages  of  a 
dialectic.  For  while  the  necessity  of  regarding  God  as  a 
transcendent  being  arises  directly  out  of  the  motive  of  the 
origin  of  religion,  yet  we  find  it  necessary,  in  order  to  reach 
any  intelligent  concept  of  his  nature,  to  figure  him  under 
the  analogies  of  our  own  personal  selfhood.  There  thus 
arises  an  inevitable  struggle,  between  the  personifying 
tendency  and  the  sense  of  transcendence,  which  leads  on  the 
one  side  to  the  ascription  to  the  divine  being  of  elements 
of  personal  character,  while  on  the  other  we  are  moved  to 
an  incessant  removal  of  the  limits  we  have  placed.  The 
result  is  a  movement  of  approximation  in  which  we  are 
progressively  conceiving  the  value  of  x  which  stands  for  the 

489 


490 


SYNTHESIS. 


PART  II. 


divine  nature,  but  never  reaching  a  definition  that  can  be 
taken  as  final.  While,  as  the  result  of  this  process,  we  find 
our  conceptions  of  God  becoming  more  intelligent  and 
rational,  we  are  nevertheless  under  the  necessity  of  admit- 
ting that  we  have  not  yet  fully  apprehended.  The  prin- 
ciple of  religious  knowledge  we  are  stating  here  cannot  be 
called  either  agnostic  or  gnostic,  inasmuch  as  it  contains 
neither  a  justification  of  ignorance  nor  of  omniscience. 

We  have  given  this  chapter  the  title  that  stands  at  its 
head  in  order  to  indicate  that  its  main  business  shall  be  a 
further  reflection  on  fundamental  ideas  of  religion  in  order 
to  reach  a  statement  of  them  that  may  be  philosophically 
satisfactory.  Keturning,  then,  to  the  question  of  the  origin 
of  religion,  we  claim  that  no  theory  of  origin  can  be  satis- 
factory that  does  not  take  into  account  the  psychological 
roots  and  conditions  of  religion  as  well  as  its  plainly  tran- 
scendent character.  What  we  have  called  the  anthropolog- 
ical theory  of  origin  seems  to  us  to  have  failed  at  both  these 
fundamental  points.  It  postulates  an  exclusively  subjective 
origin  when  it  seems  clear  that  its  transcendent  character 
demands  an  objective  origin.  It  largely  ignores  also  the 
psychological  roots  of  its  problem,  and  makes  nothing  of 
the  fact  that  religion  in  its  very  nature  is  an  affair  of  the 
reflective  consciousness.  We  have,  on  the  contrary,  en- 
deavored to  connect  the  origin  of  religion  with  its  psy- 
chological roots  in  consciousness,  and  we  have  not  only 
recognized  its  nature  as  a  phenomenon  of  reflection,  but 
have  connected  it,  through  its  extraordinary  character, 
with  the  beginnings  of  reflection.  In  reality,  however, 
there  is  nothing  surprising  in  the  supposition  that  the 
beginnings  of  reflection  are  identical  with  the  first  appre- 
hension of  the  religious  object;  or  at  least  with  the  expe- 
rience out  of  which  that  first  apprehension  grows.  It  would 
surely  require  some  objective  stimulus  of  unusual  force  to 
break  the  crust  of  spontaneity  and  embark  the  individual 
on  the  life  of  reflection.  Moreover,  when  we  consider  the 
large   function   which  religious   genius   has   performed   in 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  491 

religious  evolution,  it  is  not  unreasonable  to  assign  to  it 
here  a  function  also  in  its  origin.  In  fact,  since  the  whole 
theory  of  origin  from  any  point  of  view  of  history  is 
hypothetical,  it  is  more  reasonable  to  suppose  that  some  one 
member  of  a  tribe  took  the  initiative  in  its  origin,  than  that 
it  came  simultaneously  into  the  possession  of  the  whole 
tribe.  And  if  so,  then  it  is  more  reasonable  to  ascribe  the 
function  to  the  genius  than  to  the  ordinary  individual. 
Bearing  in  mind  that  the  primitive  man  is  a  purely  hypo- 
thetical being  whom  the  anthropologists  have  constructed 
from  their  observations  of  beings  of  the  same  species  who 
have  had  the  benefit  and  disadvantage  of  many  thousands 
of  years  of  evolution  and  devolution,  it  would  seem  evident 
that  the  only  test  that  could  be  applied  would  be  that  of  the 
adequacy  of  a  hypothesis  to  explain  facts.  Now,  that  the 
sense  of  transcendence  is  a  fact  in  religion  is  admitted. 
The  difficulty  of  accounting  for  this  fact  on  any  subjective 
theory  of  origin  has  led  us  to  adopt  the  objective  theory. 
That  religion  originated  in  some  transcendent  objective 
experience ;  that  this  experience  came  first  to  a  single  gifted 
individual,  the  religious  genius  of  his  tribe,  or  to  a  small 
group  of  such;  that  it  marked  his  own  transition  from  the 
life  of  spontaneity  to  that  of  reflection ;  that  he  became  the 
leader  and  prophet  of  his  people,  conducting  them  to  the 
religious  reflective  plane  and  taking  the  lead  in  the  move- 
ment of  personalization  by  means  of  which  the  deity  became 
gradually  characterized,— all  this  fits  together  as  a  coherent 
and  rational  account.  Moreover,  this  theory  of  origin  fits 
into  what  seems  to  be  the  most  rational  explanation  of  the 
facts  of  history.  If  the  anthropological  theory  were  true 
and  religion  had  originated  subjectively  and  by  means 
merely  of  dreams  and  ghost-visions,  the  fact  of  transcend- 
ence would  be  largely  unexplainable.  Again,  the  lowest 
forms  of  spiritism  ought  to  represent  the  oldest  forms  of 
religion.  But  this  seems  not  to  be  true.  Furthermore, 
polytheism  would  be  clearly  the  earliest  form  of  religious 
belief.     But  this  is  so  doubtful  that  Max  Miiller  is  able  to 


492  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

make  out  a  good  case  for  henotheism,  a  form  of  pluralism 
that  is  yet  more  monotheistic  than  polytheistic  in  its  spirit. 
Then,  too,  the  ethical  element  in  religion  seems  to  antedate 
polytheism  and  belong  to  the  earliest  forms  of  religion, 
while  the  unethical  character  of  polytheism  is  recognized. 
If  the  lowest  forms  of  religion  were  the  most  primitive,  then 
the  primitive  man  was  morally  degraded,  a  supposition 
that  has  no  historical  support  and  that  contradicts  logic. 
Add  to  this  the  fact  that  if  we  adopt  an  animistic  or  spirit- 
istic theory  of  origin  and  associate  it  with  a  polytheistic 
theory  of  development,  we  lose  all  power  of  distinguishing 
progressive  movements  in  religion  from  those  of  corruption 
and  degeneration.  On  the  theory  we  have  adopted,  of  the 
objective  origin  of  religion  and  the  subsequent  rise  of 
animism,  out  of  a  subjective  root,  we  are  led  to  expect  that 
the  religion  of  primitive  man  would  be  very  crude,  of  course, 
but  relatively  pure  and  moral,  while  it  would  be  free  from 
the  spirit  of  ultra-polytheism,  if  pluralistic  in  fact.  I 
mean  by  this  that  while  each  tribe  and  nation  would  have  its 
god,  and  perhaps  more  than  one,  yet  no  individual  or  tribe 
would  consciously  worship  a  plurality  of  gods  at  the  same 
time.  The  god  of  each  individual  would  be  one  god  and  his 
attitude  toward  that  one  god  would  be  more  after  the  type 
of  monotheistic  worship  than  after  that  of  polytheistic 
worship. 

The  historical  order  would  be,  first,  this  early  period 
relatively  pure  and  relatively  unpolytheistic ;  secondly,  the 
definite  origin  of  polytheism  in  the  worship  of  a  plu- 
rality of  spirits,  the  belief  in  which  has  been  developed 
by  dreams  and  ghost-visions ;  thirdly,  the  development  of  the 
earlier  monotheistic  beliefs  out  of  the  primary  henotheism, 
partly  through  a  process  of  selection  by  means  of  which 
some  one  deity  becomes  supreme,  but  more  fundamentally 
through  a  development  of  religious  ideas  which  leads  in 
turn  to  a  transition  of  deification  from  one  type  of  divine 
being  to  another.  Thus  in  Vedic  and  post-Vedic  develop- 
ments we  have  a  transition  of  deification  from  Dyaus  to 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  493 

Indra  and  from  Indra,  in  the  period  of  the  Upanishads,  to  a 
god  like  Pragapati,  the  transition  from  Dyaus  to  Indra  being 
in  the  line  of  a  higher  type  of  personalization,  while 
Pragapati  is  rather  a  creation  of  Indian  speculative  thought 
than  a  genuine  product  of  religion.  But  the  vital  point  of 
theory  is  that  the  historical  evolution  of  Indian  religious 
thought  is  from  early  henotheism,  with  its  unpolytheistic 
spirit,  directly  to  the  later  monotheism;  or  perhaps  it 
would  be  better  characterized  as  monistic  pantheism. 
After  the  rise  of  polytheism  from  its  own  animistic  root 
there  would  exist  two  opposing  tendencies  in  religion,  the 
one  moralistic  and  tending  in  the  direction  of  monotheism, 
the  other  relatively  unethical  and  tending  toward  greater 
pluralism.  This  being  the  case,  it  is  clear  that  the  poly- 
theistic tendency,  at  least  that  of  pure,  unchecked  poly- 
theism, would  be  downward  and  that  it  would  be  a 
corrupting,  degenerating  force  in  history,  while  monothe- 
ism, with  its  ethical  spirit,  would  embody  the  progressive, 
elevating  principle.  We  have  here  a  criterion  that  will  at 
least  enable  us  to  discern  the  operation  of  the  historic  forces 
with  intelligence.  Then,  further,  our  insight  will  increase 
just  in  proportion  as  we  realize  that,  taken  as  abstract 
forces  operating  independently  toward  the  production  of 
extreme  results,  the  principle  of  transcendence  will  belong 
on  the  side  of  monotheism,  while  the  principle  of  personal- 
ization will  cast  in  its  fortunes  largely  with  polytheism. 

Just  here,  though,  it  is  vitally  important  that  we  should 
not  permit  ourselves  to  be  misled.  It  is  the  abstract  opera- 
tion of  these  principles  that  thus  becomes  one-sided  and 
partisan,  the  one  leading  to  the  notion  of  a  wholly  tran- 
scendent deity,  the  other  to  that  of  a  completely  human 
god.  These  abstract,  partizan  movements  must  be  dis- 
tinguished from  the  concrete  movements  which  embody 
real  religious  progress  and  which  arise  out  of  a  dialectic 
of  the  two  principles,  a  process  in  which  each  is  modified 
by  its  opposite,  tending  on  the  one  hand  to  the  modifying 
of  transcendence  by  conceiving  it  along  lines  of  intelligible 


494  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

analogy,  while  on  the  other,  the  use  of  the  self-analogy  is 
purged  and  elevated.  It  is  only  when  we  have  thus  appre- 
hended the  dialectical  movement  that  we  can  either  inter- 
pret correctly  the  development  of  religious  reflection  in 
consciousness,  or  discern  the  actual  trend  and  scope  of  the 
objective  evolution  of  religion  in  history.  For  it  will  be 
obvious  that  a  monotheistic  movement  which  proceeded  un- 
der the  unqualified  sway  of  the  principle  of  transcendence 
would  represent  from  the  beginning  an  abstract  tendency 
that  would  lead  to  unhealthy  extremes  rather  than  normal 
progress.  And  just  as  evident  is  it  that  where  pluralism 
were  dominated  unqualifiedly  by  the  anthropomorphic 
tendency,  extreme  polytheism  would  be  the  result  rather 
than  advance  toward  higher  conceptions. 

Assuming,  then,  that  we  have  here  reached  a  true  con- 
ception of  the  origin  and  development  of  religion  among 
men,  let  us  study  briefly  two  representative  race-move- 
ments in  religion  as  a  preliminary  to  some  philosophical  con- 
clusions. These  movements  to  which  we  ask  attention  may 
be  called  Hebra-Hellenism  and  Hinduism.  We  have  already 
traced  the  Hebrew  branch  of  the  first  movement  down  to  the 
end  of  the  old  dispensation  and  have  shown  how  the  older 
monotheism  of  the  Abrahamic  period  was  revived  and 
developed  in  the  Mosaic  economy,  and  how  the  worship  of 
Jehovah,  after  Moses,  entered  into  a  struggle  with  sur- 
rounding animistic  polytheism  and  only  maintained  itself 
and  continued  to  make  healthy  progress  through  the  agency 
of  the  long  line  of  prophets  with  which  Israel  was  favored. 
The  old  dispensation  ended,  on  the  one  hand,,  in  a  mono- 
theistic belief  which  had  at  length  overcome  the  tempta- 
tions of  animism  and  polytheism ;  while  on  the  other  hand 
it  showed  signs  of  losing  its  vitality,  so  that  there  arose 
tendencies  in  the  direction  of  either  scepticism  or  religious 
formalism.  This  was  the  period  of  the  Phariseean  and 
Sadducean  sects.  What  the  logical  and  historical  result 
of  such  a  situation  would  have  been,  had  no  modifying 
influences  entered,  it  is  perhaps  not  possible  to  say.     But 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  495 

very  probably  there  would  have  resulted  an  eclipse  of  the 
Jehovistic  faith  similar  to  that  which  overtook  the  Vedic 
religions  before  the  period  of  the  Upanishads.  The  move- 
ment of  history  was  changed  and  finally  revolutionized  by 
two  causes  partly  co-operative,  partly  in  opposition.  These 
two  causes  were  Hellenism  and  Christianity.  Hellenism 
entered  through  two  doors,  both  of  which  were  opened  in 
the  city  of  Alexandria.  The  first  brought  the  treasures  of 
Greek  and  Hebrew  culture  into  contact  in  the  thought  of 
Philo  Judaeus  who  developed  a  system  of  conceptions  to 
which  the  name  Hellenic-Judaism  might  well  be  applied. 
It  was,  in  its  form,  the  application  of  the  ideas  and  methods 
of  Greek  philosophy  to  the  conceptions  of  the  Hebrew  re- 
ligion. Now,  the  fundamental  conceptions  of  Hebrew  relig- 
ion were  that  of  Jehovah  himself,  righteousness,  sin, 
mediation  and  expiation.  Hellenic-Judaism  is  a  system  of 
reflection  in  which,  employing  Greek  methods  and  ideas, 
an  attempt  is  made  to  rationalize  the  conceptions  of  Juda- 
ism and  reduce  them  to  the  coherence  of  a  philosophical 
system.  The  movement  was  not  permitted,  however,  to 
work  out  its  logical  results,  for  at  this  critical  juncture, 
when  the  fate  of  traditional  Judaism  was  trembling  in  the 
balance,  the  revolutionary  force  of  the  new  Christianity 
entered  in  and  changed  everything.  Christianity  again 
vitalized  religion  and  it  became  a  living  force  among  men, 
and  this  not  only  affected  its  influence  on  the  lives  of  men, 
but  vitalized  the  sphere  of  religious  ideas.  The  new  re- 
ligion proved  itself  able  to  meet  the  Hellenic- Judaism  of 
the  time  and  to  stem  its  rationalism  not  by  opposing  and 
casting  it  out  but  by  assimilating  its  most  vital  ideas  and 
filling  them  with  its  own  spiritual  content. 

Now  the  second  door  through  which  Hellenism  found 
entrance  was  that  of  Neo-Platonism  which  was  old  Platon- 
ism  tinctured  to  some  extent  with  the  pantheistic  and  mys- 
tical doctrines  of  Hindu  thought,  but  not  losing  their 
characteristic  Greek  spirit.  Neo-Platonism  did  not  affect 
Hebraism  directly,  but  exerted  its  direct  influence  on  Chris- 


49G  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

tianity  with  which  it  ran  parallel  during  the  first  five  cen- 
turies of  the  Christian  era.  The  relation  was  partly  one 
of  mutual  exclusion  and  opposition ;  partly  of  unhealthy 
adaptation  giving  rise  to  the  great  heretical  movements  of 
the  time ;  but  partly,  also,  normal,  giving  rise  to  the  healthy 
growth  of  Christian  doctrine.  These  centuries  marked  the 
creative  period  of  Christian  theology  and  philosophy,  during 
which  the  fundamentals  of  its  theology,  Christology,  anthro- 
pology and  soteriology,  were  developed.  That  Hellenism 
exercised  a  potent  influence  on  this  development  not  only  by 
way  of  method  and  stimulus,  but  also  by  way  of  contribut- 
ing conceptions  that  were  germane  to  the  genius  of  the  new 
religion,  is  past  dispute  when  we  consider  its  relation  both 
to  the  beginning  and  the  development  of  Christian  doctrine. 
We  have  then  in  Christianity  a  wholly  unique  religion, 
racially  considered.  One  founded  on  a  Hebra-Hellenistic 
or,  more  broadly  speaking,  on  an  Aryo-Semitic  basis,  incor- 
porating in  its  foundations  the  ethical  and  monotheistic 
religious  sense  of  the  Hebrew- Semite,  with  the  clear  ra- 
tional intelligence  of  the  Greek- Aryan. 

Turning  now  to  the  analysis  of  Hinduism,  we  have 
already  indicated  the  general  character  of  the  early  move- 
ments of  the  Indian  religions.  The  Vedic  religion  was 
never  properly  polytheistic  in  its  form  or  spirit.  While 
it  could  scarcely  be  called  monotheistic,  since  it  recognized 
a  plurality  of  gods,  yet  its  tendency  from  the  beginning 
was  away  from  polytheism  and  in  the  direction  of  the  con- 
centration of  the  principal  interest  and  worship  in  one 
deity.  We  have  seen  also  how  the  Vedas  mark  the  develop- 
ment of  Hindu  ideas  in  the  passage  from  Dyaus,  to  Indra 
and  finally  to  such  a  being  as  Pragapati  who  was  a  deifica- 
tion of  the  wisdom  of  the  later  Indian  sage.  But  it  is  in 
the  stage  of  Pragapati  that  we  reach  the  end  practically  of 
the  old  Vedic  religion,  just  as  in  Hellenic-Judaism  we  might 
under  different  circumstances  have  had  the  death-knell  of 
the  worship  of  Jehovah.  This  was  the  time  of  the  Upani- 
shads  and  the  period  of  what  Max  Miiller  calls  the  collapse 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  497 

]■«-■-         1  1  -1  •    1  ii 

of  the  gods.  Disbelief  had  swallowed  up  all  the  concrete 
deities  of  the  old  religion,  even  Pragapati  himself,  and  a 
period  of  virtual  atheism  ensued  as  might  have  ensued  in 
the  west  had  not  the  revolutionary  young  religion,  Chris- 
tianity, appeared  on  the  world's  stage  when  it  did.  What 
followed  on  this  eastern  lapse  into  atheism?  There  fol- 
lowed a  movement  that  is  in  many  vital  respects  the  eastern 
analogue  of  Neo-Platonism  in  the  west.  A  peculiar  move- 
ment of  reflection  out  of  which  emerged  (1)  Brahm  and 
(2)  the  Buddha.  The  collapse  of  the  gods,  and  with  it 
the  collapse  of  the  objective  world,  threw  the  Hindu  back 
upon  himself  in  a  peculiar  kind  of  reflection  out  of  which 
arose  the  differentiation  of  the  real  unphenomenal  self 
which  is  eternal  and  unmoved,  from  the  phenomenal  self 
that  weeps  and  laments  and  is  subject  to  wretchedness 
and  change;  the  denial  of  this  phenomenal  self  and  all  its 
works,  and  lastly,  the  identification  of  this  real  self  with 
that  which  objectively  exists.  The  only  real  is  thus  an 
objective  and  personal  self  and  "That  art  Thou."  We 
shall  see  that  there  was  a  later  reflection  that  was  different. 
But  this  is  the  reflection  that  underlies  Brahmanism,  for 
Brahm  is  just  this  objective  self,  and  "That  art  Thou." 
Brahmanism  thus  arises  as  did  the  one  of  Neo-Platonism, 
as  the  basis  of  a  purely  philosophical  religion.  It  could 
not  become  the  religion  of  any  but  the  highly  intelli- 
gent few,  and  these  became  organized  into  a  caste  and 
even  a  Brahman  could  master  it  only  when  he  had  grown 
old  in  reflection.  The  young  man,  the  child  and  the  woman 
were  left  standing  in  the  outer  court.  As  for  the  masses  of 
the  people,  even  as  for  the  educated  and  governing  classes, 
so  far  as  they  were  outside  the  Brahman  caste,  this  religion 
was  not  for  them.  The  consequence  was  a  series  of  com- 
promises with  lower  forms  of  religion,  and  as  compromise 
always  means  degeneration,  these  forms  which  constituted 
the  religion  of  the  masses  were  not  the  restored  worship  of 
the  Vedic  gods  in  their  purity,  but  rather  forms  of  idolatry 
and  superstition.  The  wonder  has  been  how  such  exalted 
32 


498  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

creeds  as  Brahmanism  and  Buddhism  should  be  compatible 
with  the  universal  practice  of  such  low  forms  of  idolatry  and 
superstition  as  are  found  among  the  masses,  and  especially 
the  lower  castes  of  Hindus.  The  reasons  may  be  given  in 
the  following  order:  (1)  a  speculative  religion  that  is 
above  the  comprehension  of  all  but  the  favored  few;  (2) 
caste;  (3)  compromise. 

It  was  a  somewhat  different  reflection  that  led  to 
Buddhism.  We  have  seen  how  the  Brahman  distinguishes 
between  the  phenomenal  and  the  real  self.  If  we  suppose 
the  next  step  to  be  the  denial  of  the  objective  existence  of 
the  ontological  self,  we  shall  have  anticipated  the  course  of 
Buddhistic  reflection.  The  Buddhist  is  a  man  who  denies 
the  existence  of  the  Brahm  and  hence  is  theoretically 
an  atheist.  But  he  has  not  denied  the  existence  of  a 
real  as  distinguished  from  the  phenomenal  self  which 
is  a  personal  being,  that  weeps  and  laments,  suffers  and 
changes.  Only,  the  real  self  is  subjective  and  is  noth- 
ing apart  from  the  ideal  of  man  himself.  The  Buddha  is 
not  God  but  one  who  succeeds  in  embodying  the  ideal  self  in 
a  life.  And  Buddhism  is  the  cult  of  those  who  take  this  self, 
which  is  the  subjective  analogue  of  Brahm,  as  that  which 
they  are  to  become.  Buddhism  is  simply  the  prescribed 
method  by  which  this  goal  is  to  be  attained.  But  Buddhism 
meets  the  same  kind  of  difficulties  Brahmanism  met  with  in 
carrying  out  its  programme.  It  is  too  abstract  and  too 
exalted  for  the  masses  and  here  compromise  becomes  neces- 
sary. Buddhism,  while  nominally  widely  spread,  has  never 
succeeded  in  conquering  the  masses  but  must  reach  them  by 
compromising  with  their  superstitions.  Like  Brahmanism 
it  presents  the  phenomenon  of  a  religion,  resting  on  the 
most  exalted  philosophical  conceptions,  which  is  nevertheless 
powerless  to  affect  the  lives  of  the  people  and  must  hand 
them  over  bodily  to  the  dominion  of  idolatry  and  super- 
stition. In  Buddhism,  caste  is  a  weaker  force  than  in  the 
religion  of  Bralnn.  Again,  its  religious  ideal,  which  is  the 
realization  of  an  ideal  selfhood,  is  more  intelligible  than 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  499 

that  of  Bralimanism.  The  first  cause  of  its  weakness  is 
its  speculative  atheism.  If  we  identify  God  with  x, 
even  mystery  has  power  over  the  imagination.  But  if  we 
deny  God  altogether  and  reduce  x  to  zero,  then  the  entire 
religious  motive  that  has  its  spring  in  God  lapses,— 
Buddhism  weakens  itself  by  its  speculative  atheism.  The 
second  cause  is  the  compromise  it  is  forced  to  make  with 
superstition.  Partly  because  it  is  rendered  powerless, 
through  its  atheism,  to  influence  the  masses,  and  partly 
because  its  phenomenalism  renders  it  powerless,  or  rela- 
tively so,  against  the  assaults  of  polytheism,  we  find  that  in 
Buddhistic  countries  polytheism  runs  mad  and  superstition 
holds  the  masses  under  the  spell  of  the  worst  forms  of 
idolatry. 

This  analysis  will  enable  us,  I  think,  to  see  what  the 
deeper  current  of  religious  development  among  the  Hindus 
has  been  and  it  will  also  give  us  an  insight  into  the  real 
religious  conditions  of  the  present.  From  what  possible 
quarters  could  a  movement  for  the  internal  regeneration 
of  the  Indian  religion  proceed?  In  the  first  place,  an 
attempt  might  be  made  to  restore  the  religion  of  the  Vedas. 
But  the  barrier  that  would  be  met  here  would  be  the  fact 
that  the  old  religion  never  reached  a  pure  monotheistic 
basis.  The  first  monotheism  of  the  Hindu  thought  is  al- 
most purely  speculative.  The  old  Vedic  religion  would  be 
impracticable.  In  the  second  place,  a  movement  might  be 
initiated  in  the  direction  of  a  reformed  Brahmanism.  This 
would  have  the  virtue  of  overcoming  atheism.  But  how 
is  Brahmanism  to  overcome  the  obstacle  of  caste?  And  if 
caste  should  be  conceded  as  a  necessary  evil,  how  is  it  to 
bring  its  speculative  ideal  in  its  aristocratic  setting  into 
any  sort  of  vital  relations  with  the  lives  of  the  people? 
Again,  a  movement  might  be  started  looking  toward  a 
reform  of  Buddhism.  But  how  can  Buddhism  be  reformed 
unless  first  its  atheism  be  cured?  This  is  the  fontal  source 
of  its  characteristic  weakness.  Until  it  be  cured  of  its 
atheism  it  remains  a  system  of  pure  humanism  and  will 


500  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

manifest  all  the  characteristic  weaknesses  of  any  religion 
that  has  eliminated  from  it  the  notion  of  transcendence. 
It  will  ever  fall  an  easy  prey  to  animism  and  all  forms  of 
polytheistic  superstition.  If,  in  the  last  place,  it  be  pro- 
posed to  institute  an  eclectic  religion  composed  of  elements 
selected  from  various  oriental  and  even  occidental  creeds, 
it  ought  to  be  borne  in  mind  that  history  has  put  the  stamp 
of  failure  on  religious  eclecticism.  Eclecticism  will  never 
have  the  virility  necessary  to  achieve  the  herculean  task 
it  has  before  it  in  India.  It  looks  as  though  no  cause  could 
be  adequate  to  produce  *the  result  except  the  rise  of  a 
vigorous  young  religion  that  would  represent  a  decided 
advance  on  all  the  older  forms  and  that  would  do  for  the 
India  of  to-day  what  Christianity  did  for  the  Europe  of  its 
younger  years. 

The  review  that  we  have  just  completed  will  fairly  bear 
out,  as  I  think,  one  philosophical  conclusion  in  regard  to  the 
religious  history  of  the  east;  namely,  that  no  event  in  the 
religious  history  of  India  corresponds  with  the  advent 
of  Christianity  in  the  western  world.  Christianity  came, 
as  we  saw,  at  a  most  critical  juncture,  in  time  to  save  the 
Jehovistic  religion  from  collapse.  It  came  when  the  stream 
of  Hellenic  thought  began  for  the  first  time  to  vitally 
influence  Hebrew  beliefs.  And  it  came  at  a  juncture  where 
it  became  both  the  inheritor  and  the  purifier  of  the  conse- 
quent rationalistic  movement  that  resulted  from  the  coales- 
cence. Moreover,  it  came  in  time  to  forestall  the  decadence 
and  atheism  into  which  Europe  would  almost  inevitably 
have  fallen.  Christianity  saved  the  Jehovistic  worship 
and  it  saved  Europe  from  atheism.  Now  nothing  analogous 
to  this  has  happened  in  the  orient.  The  later  Vedic  hymns 
betray  a  kind  of  consternation  in  view  of  the  scepticism 
with  which  the  Vedic  gods  are  beginning  to  be  regarded. 
In  the  Upanishads  the  result  has  been  accepted  as  inevita- 
ble, and  the  effort  is  being  made  to  save  religion,  in  spite  of 
the  death  of  the  gods,  by  placing  it  on  a  speculative  basis. 
Out  of  this  develops  the  conception  of  Brahm  and  the  cult 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  501 

founded  upon  it,  But  Brahmanism  proved  to  be  no  evangel 
like  Christianity.  The  Veclic  gods  were  dead  and  Brahman- 
ism succeeded  only  in  putting  a  metaphysical  deity  in  their 
places  and  one  that  was  too  exclusive  and  too  far  removed 
to  touch  vitally  the  life  or  convictions  of  the  people.  The 
only  oriental  religion  that  claims  comparison  with  Chris- 
tianity, historically  or  in  view  of  its  content,  is  Buddhism/ 
Now  it  is  true  that  the  central  figures  of  Buddhism  and 
Christianity  have  many  things  in  common.  In  fact,  in 
their  ethical  and  sympathetic  relations  with  life,  in  their 
personal  abnegation,  and  in  their  exalted  ideals,  they  have 
very  much  in  common.  We  have  to  look  at  the  differences 
in  order  to  see  how  very  unlike  the  two  evangels  are.  In 
the  first  place,  we  find  that,  historically,  the  founder  of 
Christianity  fell  heir  to  a  monotheistic  religion  that  was 
still  alive,  though  modified  by  Greek  rationalistic  influences, 
while  Gotama  had  back  of  him  atheism  and  a  vision  of  dead 
gods,— I  do  not  say  Brahmanism,  for  he  had  rejected 
Brahm.  His  atheism  included  Brahm  as  well  as  the  older 
gods.  Again,  the  founder  of  Christianity  kept  himself  in 
line  with  the  antecedent  Jewish  monotheism  by  transform- 
ing the  conception  of  the  living  and  transcendent  Jehovah 
into  that  of  the  living  Father  in  Heaven.  He  is  the  inheritor, 
therefore,  of  the  whole  ethical  and  spiritual  force  of  the 
Jehovistic  tradition.  Buddha  has  broken  with  the  religious 
traditions  of  his  people  and  has  no  transcendent  element 
to  put  in  their  place.  Where  there  was  before  the  Vedic 
gods,  or  Brahm,  and  all  that  these  might  imply,  there  is 
now  only  x.  Again,  the  founder  of  Christianity,  conscious 
of  his  own  close  relation  of  sonship  to  the  Heavenly  Father, 
seeks  to  develop  the  same  sense  of  sonship  in  his  disciples. 
They  are  children  and  heirs  of  God,  being  joint  heirs  with 
himself.  This,  I  think,  is  one  of  the  most  dynamic  of  the 
concepts  of  Christianity..  For  a  sharer  in  the  divine  life 
has  all  the  resources  of  the  divine  life  at  his  disposal  and 
will  have  as  much  strength,  as  much  hope,  as  much  forti- 
tude and  peace,   as  God  and  himself  together.     Buddha 


502  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

has  the  same  excellent  personal  life  to  commend  his  doc- 
trine, but  the  ideal  is  that  of  self  shorn  of  all  divine  asso- 
ciations. We  may  write  self  large ;  we  may  represent  it  in 
its  ideal  charm  and  attractiveness;  it  will  never  acquire  a 
dynamic  equal  to  that  of  a  divine  life  whose  resources  are 
open  to  the  human.  Lastly,  the  founder  of  Christianity 
presents  his  disciples  with  an  ideal  of  life  that  includes 
the  future, — the  other  side  as  well  as  the  hidden  side  of 
death,— in  its  perspective.  Death  is  the  great  spectre  that 
stands  at  the  door  of  every  man's  consciousness  and  mini- 
mizes the  value  of  his  existence  by  confining  it  to  the 
time-span  of  the  present  mortal  life.  But  death  loses  its 
power  in  presence  of  a  vision  of  life  that  compasses  both 
sides  of  the  grave.  Here  is  another  tremendous  contribu- 
tor to  the  dynamic  of  Christianity.  Buddhism,  with  the 
most  exalted  ideal,  puts  the  emphasis  mainly  on  the  pres- 
ent. Its  vision  grows  dim  and  its  faith  halting  when  it 
contemplates  the  other  side  of  death.  The  eclipse  of 
immortality  in  human  life  is  due  directly  to  the  eclipse  of 
the  transcendent  objective  element  of  religion  in  atheism. 
It  would  seem,  then,  that  neither  historically  nor  intrinsic- 
ally can  Buddhism  be  regarded  as  competent  to  do  for  the 
people  of  India  what  Christianity  was  able  to  accom- 
plish for  the  peoples  of  the  west.  In  order  to  come  into  a 
position  where  it  would  have  the  same  power,  something 
must  happen  to  it  to  cure  its  atheism  and  its  blindness  to 
immortality. 

Let  us  pass  in  review,  then,  some  of  the  elements  which 
seem  to  be  both  philosophically  and  historically  necessary 
to  religion.  In  the  first  place,  there  is  that  great  central 
conception  of  God  which,  philosophically,  holds  the  primacy 
and,  historically,  has  been  central  in  the  religious  develop- 
ments. We  have  seen  that  the  historical  movements  of 
religion  can  be  regarded  as  progressive  only  when  the  idea 
of  God  is  preserved  in  its  transcendence  as  well  as  in 
its  relationship  with  humanity.  In  Jehovah,  particularly, 
when  we  conceive  Jehovahism  as  entering  into  the  life  of 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  503 

Christianity,  we  have  the  one  instance  in  history  in  which 
the  synthetic  conception  of  the  deity  as  transcendent  and 
yet  as  personally  related  to  men,  has  had  the  opportunity  to 
work  itself  out  with  anything  like  completeness.  Now, 
philosophically,  the  thought  of  the  present  tends  to  identify 
the  idea  of  God  with  that  of  a  transcendent  self.  If  we 
conceive  Jehovah  as  having  become  the  God  of  Christianity 
and,  therefore,  as  being  the  Father  in  Heaven  as  well  as  the 
more  speculative  One  of  the  later  theology,  then  the  God  of 
Christianity  is  conceivable  as  a  transcendent  self.  We 
have  seen  that  Buddhism  has  no  corresponding  conception. 
But  in  Brahm  we  have  a  deity  who  is  not  only  conceived  as 
a  transcendent  self,  but  as  the  only  real  self,  with  which 
our  own  self,  in  so  far  as  it  is  real,  is  identical.  Between 
Brahm  and  the  Christian  conception  of  the  deity  there 
is  this  essential  difference:  one  affirms,  the  other  denies, 
the  identity  of  the  human  self  with  the  divine.  Let 
us  put  the  Christian  concept  of  relation  in  its  highest 
form  in  the  words  of  the  apostle,  In  Him  we  live  and 
move  and  have  our  being.  Here  is  the  closest  possible 
relation  short  of  identity,  but  a  denial  of  identity.  The 
apostle  could  not  say,  "That  art  Thou."  In  Brahman- 
ism,  with  its  profound  identification  of  the  soul  with 
God,  and  in  the  Christian  conception  of  an  including  self- 
hood that  at  the  same  time  recognizes  our  difference,  we 
doubtless  find  the  two  modes  of  conceiving  the  divine  being 
which  may  be  regarded  as  thoroughly  philosophical  and 
between  which  the  suffrages  of  speculative  minds  will 
always  be  distributed. 

Then,  again,  there  is  the  idea  of  the  human  soul,  which 
may  be  taken  as  fundamental  in  religion.  The  philo- 
sophical conception  of  the  soul  is  no  doubt  one  in  which  it 
is  identified  with  the  self,  so  that  many  a  one  who  would 
shrink  from  admitting  that  he  had  a  soul  would  have  no 
scruples  about  laying  claim  to  a  self.  Now,  without  going 
into  any  vexed  questions  here,  the  distinction  is  made  by 
everyone  between  his  present,  phenomenal  self  which  he  is 


504  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

at  any  present  moment,  and  the  ideal  self  which  every  one 
would  like  to  be,  or  feels  he  ought  to  be.  It  is  this 
ideal  self  which  one  feels  one  ought  to  be  that  is  the  self 
of  religion  and  that  we  therefore  dignify  with  the  name  of 
soul.  Our  soul  is  the  self  we  ought  to  be  and  which 
we  are  in  danger  of  losing  when  we  turn  away  from  God 
or  commit  sin.  It  is  evident  that  this  soul  which  a  man 
may  lose  is  the  soul  that  relates  him  to  religion  and  which 
religion  is  to  be  the  means  of  saving.  Let  us  compare  this 
term  in  Christianity,  then,  with  the  corresponding  term  in 
Brahmanism  and  Buddhism.  In  Christianity  the  soul  is 
so  real  that  it  is  the  arena  on  which  are  worked  out  all  the 
issues  of  redemption  and  salvation.  A  man's  soul  is  his 
real  self ;  and  so  it  cannot  die.  It  is  the  self  that  he  ought 
to  be ;  and  so  he  may  lose  it.  But  the  loss  and  gain  of  it  are 
both  eternal  and  not  measurable  by  time.  Hence  the 
momentous  need  of  salvation,  and  its  method,  being  recon- 
ciled with  God  and  entering  into  and  being  included  in  the 
divine  life.  If  my  soul  be  hid  in  the  divine  life  then  it  is 
saved.  In  Brahmanism,  the  soul  is  also  identical  with  the 
self  that  the  Brahman  aspires  to,— feels,  in  short,  that  he 
ought  to  be.  The  whole  situation  is,  however,  for  him  a 
much  more  speculative  and  contemplative  one.  He  has  not 
the  same  sense  of  sin  as  the  Christian  and  there  is  not  the 
same  practical  urgency.  If  he  is  to  reach  the  peace  which 
is  his  ideal,  he  must,  in  fact,  think  himself  into  it,  and  he 
can  do  this  only  by  thinking  himself  into  identity  with 
Brahm,  who  is  the  peace  itself.  The  method  of  his  salva- 
-tion  is  speculative,  therefore,  and  it  seeks  as  its  goal  com- 
plete identity  with  Brahm.  There  is  no  other  real  self  or 
soul  than  Brahm  and  my  salvation  is  achieved  when  I 
can  say  "That  am  7."  In  the  Brahman  salvation  the 
soul  becomes  God  and  has  no  other  existence  except  the 
divine.  In  Buddhism  also  the  soul  is  central.  Only,  here 
it  stands  alone  in  the  universe  without  any  divine  com- 
panion. The  Buddhist's  soul  is  the  real  self,— the  self  of 
the  Buddha  if  you  please,  which  stands  as  his  ideal  and 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  505 

which  he  aspires  to  be.  The  way  of  salvation  is  the  way  of 
self-help,  through  self-denial  and  asceticism,  and  the  goal 
is  the  realization  of  the  life  of  a  Buddha.  Now  the  Bud- 
dhistic ideal  is  less  dynamic  than  the  Christian.  The  ideal 
is  less  ethical  and  more  speculative,  and  reflection  and 
quietism  have  a  larger  function  to  play  in  its  realization. 
We  have  the  soul  recognized  as  central,  therefore,  in  all 
three  religions:  its  aim,  salvation;  realized  in  Chris- 
tianity by  inclusion  (hiding)  in  the  divine;  in  Brahman- 
ism  by  self-identification  with  the  divine,  and  in  Buddhism 
by  self-realization  of  the  Buddhistic  ideal.  Comparing  the 
three  methods  by  which  in  the  three  religions  the  soul  seeks 
to  save  itself,  we  find  that  Christianity  is  the  only  one  in 
which  the  soul  avails  itself  explicitly  of  the  divine  help ; 
in  both  Brahmanism  and  Buddhism  the  soul  finds  its 
way  to  its  goal  more  by  its  own  unaided  efforts. 

Another  idea  that  is  fundamental  in  religion  is  that  of 
mediation  and  the  notion  of  some  mediator.  This  idea 
cannot  be  said  to  be  universal  in  all  religions.  It  is  per- 
haps confined  largely  to  religions  of  the  monotheistic  type, 
or  at  least  to  those  of  monotheistic  tendency.  No  doubt  the 
idea  of  mediation  would  first  arise  out  of  the  sense  of 
guilt  or  the  sense  of  fear,  perhaps  out  of  both  combined, 
and  it  would  take  the  form  of  some  days-man— a  friend 
to  both  parties,  standing  between  the  offender  and  the 
angry  deity.  The  object  of  the  mediation  would  of 
course  be  to  bring  about  reconciliation  and  remove  the 
apprehension  of  punishment;  or  where  the  sense  of  guilt 
entered  in,  to  attain  forgiveness.  We  are  not  concerned 
here  with  the  lower  forms  of  mediation,  but  rather  with 
the  idea  of  mediation  as  it  is  exemplified  in  the  higher  re- 
ligions. While  it  is  true  that  fear  and  sense  of  guilt  will 
be  what  gives  man  the  first  consciousness  of  the  need  of 
mediation,  it  is  not  true  that  the  idea  has  no  other  re- 
ligious basis.  The  idea  of  mediation  is  one  of  which  the 
historical  and  philosophical  roots  are  very  likely  distinct. 
Historically,  either  the  feeling  of  guilt  and  the  consequent 


506  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

fear  of  punishment,  or  the  feeling  of  God's  great  distance 
from  the  human  soul,  would  be  likely  causes  of  the  need 
which  would  be  met  regularly  by  a  mediating  priesthood 
and  the  institution  of  propitiatory  sacrifices.  Propitiation, 
however,  represents  only  one  and  that  the  lowest  side  of 
mediation.  Propitiation  itself  may  spring  from  higher  or 
lower  motives  and  may  be  either  degraded  and  supersti- 
tious or  relatively  pure  and  intelligent.  At  its  bottom, 
however,  whatever  form  it  may  take,  there  will  be  the  sense 
of  having  got  on  the  debit  side  of  the  divine  ledger,  and 
the  feeling  that  something  is  due  from  us  by  way  of  can- 
celling the  claims  and  turning  aside  the  penalty  that  might 
otherwise  fall  upon  us.  On  the  other  hand,  the  sense  of 
distance  from  God  that  would  arise  from  a  tendency  to 
over-emphasize  the  transcendent  attributes  of  the  divine 
character  would  not  of  itself  call  for  any  propitiatory 
rites.  It  would  tend  to  produce  religious  indifference  or 
else  it  would  stimulate  a  desire  to  come  into  closer  and 
more  personal  relations  with  God.  It  is  here,  I  think,  that 
we  begin  to  descry  the  philosophical  root  of  mediation. 
Aroused  by  the  sense  of  the  divine  distance  men  would  begin 
to  aspire  after  a  closer  walk  with  God.  Or,  let  us  say,  that 
in  some  community  where  the  ethical  worship  of  a  tran- 
scendent divinity  like  Jehovah  has  prevailed,  the  people  on 
account  of  an  over-emphasis  of  transcendent  attributes 
begin  to  lose  the  sense  of  that  intimate  presence  of  the 
divine  in  their  lives  which  is  necessary  to  the  mainte- 
nance of  vital  religion.  The  effect  on  the  masses  would  very 
likely  be  religious  indifference  and  preparedness  for  the  in- 
roads of  some  form  of  superstition ;  whereas,  on  some  gifted 
soul  or  souls  it  would  have  a  different  effect  and  would  rouse 
them  up  to  meet  and  stem  the  religious  decline  by  preach- 
ing a  revival.  These  men,  if  they  be  true  prophets,  would  not 
aim  simply  to  reinstate  the  old ;  they  would  have  diagnosed 
the  spiritual  situation  correctly  and  would  have  arrived 
at  the  conviction  that  what  is  needed  is  a  gospel  in  which 
greater  emphasis  shall  be  placed  on  the  personal  side  of 


chap.vh.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  507 

the  divine  character  and  relations.  In  short,  these  men 
would  mediate  a  conception  of  the  divine  character  and  re- 
lation that  would  have  the  effect  of  bringing  God  and  man 
into  closer  union.  The  philosophical  root  of  mediation  is, 
therefore,  this  aspiration  for  closer  unity  between  the 
human  and  the  divine.  Now  it  is  possible  for  the  historic 
motive  arising  from  the  sense  of  sin,  let  us  say,  and  the 
philosophical  motive  to  coalesce  and  move  in  the  same 
direction.  Historically,  this  has  doubtless  taken  place, 
and  in  the  higher  religions,  especially,  it  would  be  impos- 
sible to  ignore  the  philosophical  motive  as  a  force  in  the 
production  of  historic  results. 

This  will  be  apparent  if  we  state  the  problem  of  media- 
tion from  a  somewhat  different  point  of  view,— one  that  will 
connect  it  with  the  dialectic  between  the  principles  of 
transcendence  and  personalization.  Mediation  from  this 
point  of  view  is  effected  by  personalization.  Wherever 
we  find  the  effort  to  personalize  the  deity,  there  we  shall 
find  also  the  motive  of  mediation  at  work.  The  distance  be- 
tween God  and  man  must  be  lessened,  unity  must  be 
effected,  and  in  order  to  achieve  this,  not  only  must  man 
elevate  his  thoughts  of  God,  but  God  must  come  down  to 
man's  thoughts  in  forms  of  closer  personality. 

Only  when  the  elevating  of  thought  thus  coincides  with 
the  approximating  of  nearer  personalization  on  the  part 
of  the  deity  will  true  mediation  be  effected.  If  we  assumed 
fixity  on  the  part  of  our  idea  of  God,  or  incapacity  on  the 
part  of  man  for  the  elevation  of  his  conceptions,  then  real 
mediation  would  be  impossible.  Where  these  meet  it  will 
be  realized.  We  can  thus  understand  how  the  prophetic 
function  in  general  must  be  one  of  mediation, — also  the 
conditions  of  its  failure  to  produce  lasting  results.  It  also 
enables  us  to  determine  what  the  ideal  mediation  will  be. 
Conceived  in  thought,  it  will  be  the  process  by  which  the 
human  soul  becomes  one  with  its  divine  ideal  and  thus 
enters  into  the  divine  life  without  losing  its  own  person- 
ality.    Represented  in  terms  of  religious  experience,  it  will 


508  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

be  that  emotional  process  by  which  the  soul  of  man  becomes 
one  with  God  in  the  unity  of  love.  Realized  on  the  page 
of  history  as  a  drama  of  world-experience,  it  will  be  the 
embodiment  in  phenomenal  form  of  a  divine-human  con- 
sciousness which  works  out  the  unification  in  terms  of  a  life, 
—a  life  that  is  to  stand  henceforth  as  the  concrete  embodi- 
ment of  the  highest  spiritual  aspiration. 

Comparing  the  treatment  of  mediation  by  the  three 
religions  we  have  already  been  considering,  Brahmanism, 
Buddhism  and  Christianity,  it  will  be  found  that  in  Brah- 
manism there  is  little  place  for  mediation.  Brahm  stands 
there  impersonal,  immovable,  and  the  soul  of  man  must 
approach  him  by  divesting  itself  of  its  personality.  When 
it  has  completed  this  process  of  disrobement  it  has  already 
become  Brahm.  This  will  be  the  result  whether  named 
from  the  standpoint  of  thought  or  emotion.  The  absolute 
fixity  and  impassiveness  of  Brahm  precludes  mediation. 
In  Buddhism,  on  the  contrary,  mediation  is  provided  for 
and  is  in  a  sense  central.  The  Buddha  himself  is  the 
mediator,  and  what  he  mediates  is  the  process  by  which  the 
Buddhist  realizes  his  Buddhistic  ideal.  There  is  much  here 
that  is  analogous  to  Christianity.  The  Buddha  lives  the 
ideal  life  which  becomes  the  model  for  religious  living. 
The  Buddha  through  his  life  becomes  formed  in  the  life 
of  the  disciple  as  the  norm  of  what  he  is  himself  to  become. 
There  is  this  drama  of  real  mediation  in  Buddhism  which 
constitutes  an  element  of  vital  power  over  the  minds  of 
men.  That  the  mediation  is  not  ideally  complete  is  due  to 
another  feature  of  this  religion,  namely,  its  atheism.  The 
atheism  tends  not  only  toward  general  impotency,  but  it 
takes  away  the  objective  character  of  Buddhism  and  re- 
duces it  to  a  system  of  pure  phenomenalism.  Buddha 
stands  as  the  objective  ideal  of  the  disciple,  and  thus 
mediates  his  own  realization  in  the  disciple's  life.  But 
there  being  no  transcendent  deity  in  the  background,  the 
difficulty  of  Buddhism  rests  at  the  opposite  pole  from  that 
of  Brahmanism.     The  divine  element  of  stable  balance  is 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  509 

lacking  and  the  one-sided  humanism  of  the  system  creates 
a  tendency  to  gravitate  in  the  direction  of  anthropomorph- 
ism and  the  lower  forms  of  polytheism. 

Historically,  as  well  as  logically,  we  are  led  to  expect  that 
the  ideal  requirements  of  mediation,  if  fulfilled  in  any  re- 
ligion, will  be  fulfilled  in  a  religion  of  the  type  of  Christian- 
ity. We  have  seen  that  Christianity  fell  heir  to  both 
Judaism  and  Hellenism;  the  former  supplying  it  a  historical 
example  of  mediation  on  the  plane  of  history,  in  the  pro- 
phetic mediations  between  Jehovah  and  his  people,  while  the 
latter,  in  its  idea  of  the  logos,  and  especially  in  the  form 
which  this  took  in  the  doctrine  of  logoi  or  intermediate 
beings,  in  the  system  of  Philo,  gave  an  illustration  of  the 
working  out  of  the  notion  of  mediation  in  the  sphere  of  re- 
flection. Mediation  was  in  the  air,  therefore,  when  the  new 
religion  arose,  and  Christianity  was  in  a  position  of  vantage 
for  working  out  an  ideal  solution  of  its  problem.  We  are  not 
dealing  here  with  the  question  of  what  Jesus,  the  founder 
of  Christianity,  professed  to  be,  or  in  fact  with  any  phase 
of  the  question  of  the  truth  or  validity  of  the  claims  of 
Christianity.  The  only  question  we  are  here  concerned  to 
answer  is  how  Christianity  met  the  requirements  for 
ideal  mediation  between  God  and  man.  I  think  the  answer 
must  be  that  these  ideal  requirements  were  in  all  sub- 
stantial respects  met  and  satisfied.  We  have  seen  what 
ideal  mediation  involves  in  the  subjective  spheres  of 
religious  ideas  and  religious  experience.  The  objective 
counterpart  of  this  in  history  is  the  appearance  of  a 
God-man  in  phenomenal  form  whose  life  shall  be  a  prac- 
tical solution  of  the  mediational  problem  for  men  as  well 
as  a  model  of  the  life  that  they  are  themselves  to  live  and 
to  strive  after.  The  Christ  of  Christianity  is  the  embodi- 
ment of  this  ideal,  and  his  life  stands  as  the  historical  work- 
ing out  of  the  drama  of  an  ideal  mediation,  a  historical 
incorporation  of  the  norm  of  a  new  life  in  the  consciousness 
of  man. 

The  subjects  of  sin  and  salvation  are  closely  related 


510  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

to  that  of  mediation,  for  while  we  have  seen  that  me- 
diation has  other  motives  than  the  sense  of  sin  and 
guilt,  yet  these  also  enter  in  and  modify  the  whole 
process  so  that  it  becomes  soteriological  as  well  as  media- 
tional.  Every  religion  will  have  its  practical  doctrine  of 
salvation,  its  method  of  securing  its  life-ideal,  whatever 
this  may  be,  through  the  practice  of  its  religion  and  espe- 
cially by  means  of  expiation  and  sacrifice.  We  are  dealing 
here  especially  with  the  higher  and  more  ethical  forms  of 
religion  in  which  the  sense  of  sin  has  developed  and 
soteriology  has  taken  on  a  philosophical  aspect.  Now  it  is 
important  that  we  should  distinguish  between  the  sense  of 
guilt  and  the  sense  of  sin.  The  sense  of  guilt  is  the  feeling 
of  incurred  penalty  and  may  exist  where  our  sense  of  sin  is 
not  at  all  lively.  It  may,  in  fact,  be  largely  made  up  of 
anticipations  of  punishment.  The  remainder  of  the  feel- 
ing will  be  one  of  legal  putability.  A  man  may  be  ad- 
judged guilty ;  he  can  only  be  made  sinful.  If  we  arrange 
the  soteriological  motives  in  the  scale  of  fear,  guilt  and  sin, 
it  will  be  found  that  in  the  highest  religions  the  dominating 
soteriological  motive  will  be  that  of  sin.  "What,  then,  are 
we  to  understand  by  sin  ?  The  famous  Westminster  stand- 
ards define  sin  as  ' '  any  want  of  conformity  to,  or  transgres- 
sion of,  the  law  of  God."  That  definition  is  sufficiently 
broad,  since  it  says  in  substance  that  sin  may  be  either  a 
state  of  rest  or  a  state  of  motion,— either  negative  or  positive 
as  failure  to  conform,  or  active  transgression.  It  also  brings 
out  another  important  quality  of  sin;  namely,  its  ethical 
character ;  it  is  a  breach  of  law.  And  lastly,  the  breach  of 
law  only  becomes  sin  when  that  law  is  divine.  Let  us  see  if 
we  can  get  a  description  of  sin  from  these  elements.  Sin  ob- 
jectively is  the  condition  of  non-conformity  or  active  hos- 
tility to  a  law  that  combines  moral  and  religious  sanctions. 
Subjectively  and  psychologically,  it  arises  as  the  sense  or 
feeling  of  this  non-conformity  or  active  opposition  of  will. 
Let  us  translate  the  law  that  combines  both  ethical  and 
religious  sanctions  into  terms  of  an  ideal,  the  divine  ideal 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  511 

that  stands  as  the  goal  of  mediation.  The  content  of 
this  ideal  will  be  enjoined  in  the  form  of  a  law  that  com- 
bines both  ethical  and  religious  sanctions,  and  sin  will 
arise  objectively  as  either  failure  to  conform,  or  opposition. 
Subjectively,  it  will  be  a  man's  consciousness  of  this  failure 
or  opposition.  Clearly,  then,  sin  may  be  constitutional  as  ' 
well  as  functional.  Or,  to  use  the  terms  of  science, 
sin  may  be  congenital  as  well  as  acquired  by  the  in- 
dividual. We  shall  not  get  to  the  bottom  of  sin  till  we 
treat  it  as  congenitally  inheritable  as  well  as  functionally 
acquirable.  We  arrive  at  the  sense  of  congenital  as  well  as 
actual  sin  when  the  religious  consciousness  brings  our  lives 
and  our  present  status  into  comparison  with  the  require- 
ments of  that  ideal  which  bears  the  ethical  and  religious 
sanctions. 

When  connected  with  sin  in  the  profound  sense  we 
have  indicated,  soteriology  takes  on  its  most  philosophical 
form.  It  can  be  no  longer  simply  a  device  for  escaping 
punishment,  or  an  instrument  for  the  removal  of  the  guilt 
of  actual  transgression.  It  must  strike  deeper  and  lay 
hold  of  the  ideal.  The  standard  of  the  sinless  is  that  per- 
fect law  of  liberty ;  that  divine  ideal  which  we  must  realize 
in  order  to  attain  the  goal  of  the  religious  life,  unity  with 
God.  In  view  of  this  standard,  we  are  both  congenitally 
and  in  our  present  character,  non-conf ormers  and  transgres- 
sors. We  are  sinners  in  the  profoundest  sense,  and  we 
need  a  salvation  that  can  lay  hold  on  our  profoundest 
nature  and  work  out  its  redemption.  A  soteriology  that  is 
philosophically  satisfactory  is  one,  moreover,  that  identifies 
itself  with  the  mediational  function  in  religion.  Through 
the  motive  supplied  by  sin,  the  process  of  mediation  becomes 
soteriological  and  embodies  itself  in  the  way  of  redemption 
and  salvation. 

The  last  topic  we  shall  consider  here  is  immortality. 
That  the  early  religions  should  be  silent  as  to  immortality 
is  no  matter  for  wonder.  The  awakened  man  (and  we 
have  contended  that  religion  must  awaken  him)  must  first 


512  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

meet  death  and  reflect  on  it  before  thoughts  of  a  life 
beyond  death  can  arise.  We  take  death  for  granted  and  it 
scarcely  occurs  to  us  that  any  other  attitude  is  possible. 
We  have  only  to  study  the  animals,  however,  in  order  to 
become  acquainted  with  a  species  of  life  that  has  no  knowl- 
edge of  death.  The  animal  comes  upon  the  phenomenon, 
of  course,  but  it  is  debatable  whether  even  the  most  gifted 
animals  regard  it  with  anything  more  than  dumb  amaze- 
ment. The  primitive  man  would  have  to  familiarize  him- 
self with  death  and  he  would  have  to  accumulate  sufficient 
experience  to  enable  him  to  roughly  conclude  that  all  men 
die,  before  the  certainty  of  death  could  be  brought  home 
to  his  own  consciousness  with  any  degree  of  force.  Hav- 
ing in  some  sense  reflected  death,  it  would  be  possible  for 
him  to  trouble  himself  about  the  problem  of  life  beyond 
death.  The  anthropologists  tell  us  that  polytheistic  relig- 
ions like  the  Greek  were  earlier  developers  of  the  belief  in 
the  life  beyond  death  than  monotheistic  religions  like  that 
of  the  Hebrews.  As  evidence,  they  point  to  the  alleged  fact 
that  the  Hebrew  scriptures  until  a  late  period  in  Judaism 
are  silent  on  the  subject  of  a  future  existence,  and  find  all 
their  motives  for  religious  living  in  the  present  life.  It  is 
pointed  out  at  the  same  time  that  the  Greeks  had  a  fairly 
well  developed  doctrine  of  immortality.  What  force  there 
may  be  in  this  claim  I  am  not  prepared  to  determine. 
But  that  polytheism  might  in  the  course  of  its  develop- 
ment, through  natural  causes,  come  into  possession  of  a 
doctrine  of  survival  earlier  than  monotheism,  is  historically 
plausible  if  we  consider  the  fact  that  polytheism  had  its 
origin  in  animistic  roots.  The  historical  doctrine  here 
advocated  is  that  the  primal  root  of  religion  is  monotheistic, 
in  germ,  while  polytheism  grows  out  of  animism  which  rep- 
resents a  second  stage  and  a  distinct  root.  Now  the  ani- 
mistic distinction  between  body  and  spirit  would  foster  a  be- 
lief in  the  spirit's  ability  to  live  an  independent  existence. 
We  find  in  animism,  then,  a  motive  for  the  early  develop- 
ment of  the  belief  in  survival,  and  polytheism  growing  out 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  513 

of  animistic  soil  becomes  the  inheritor  of  this  motive.  The 
monotheistic  consciousness,  in  a  measure  lacking  this  origina  1 
motive,  and  being  more  absorbed  with  the  present  relations 
of  man  with  God  and  the  divine  law,  would  perhaps  be 
slower  in  arriving  at  this  belief.  Before  the  distinction  be- 
tween body  and  soul  arose,  the  soul  would  seem  to  perish, 
or  at  least  to  disappear  with  the  death  of  the  body,  and 
death  itself  would  seem  to  effectively  block  the  way  to  any 
insight  into  the  region  beyond.  We  do  not  argue  the  case 
here,  but  simply  point  to  the  fact  that  the  animistic  belief 
in  separate  spirits  would  supply  a  germ  out  of  which  poly- 
theism might  independently,  and  in  advance  of  monotheism, 
develop  a  doctrine  of  existence  after  death. 

Whatever  the  origin  of  the  belief  in  existence  after 
death  may  have  been,  and  however  doubtful  may  be  the 
question  as  to  whether  the  monotheistic  or  polytheistic 
religions  took  the  lead  in  its  development,  it  is  clear  that 
the  problem  is  one  which  presses  for  solution  in  all  later  and 
highly  developed  religions.  Even  Buddhism,  which  is  athe- 
istical and  might,  therefore,  be  pardoned  for  confining  the 
life  of  man  to  the  present  state  of  existence,  teaches  that  the 
soul  can  achieve  immortality  by  becoming  a  Buddha.  By 
travelling  the  way  of  salvation  it  may  realize  its  ideal  and 
become  absorbed  into  nirvana,  which  may  to  the  ordinary 
mortal  mean  annihilation,  but  to  the  Buddhist  who  thus 
realizes  his  ideal,  death  and  even  karma  are  overcome,  and 
the  soul  becomes  one  with  Buddha.  Buddhism  teaches 
a  doctrine  of  limited  immortality  at  least.  Brahmanism 
does  not  teach  the  survival  of  the  soul  in  any  phenomenal 
sense.  It  even  denies  personal  immortality  in  any  ordinary 
meaning  of  that  term.  But  we  are  not  justified,  therefore, 
in  saying  that  Brahmanism  denies  immortality.  On  the  con- 
trary, the  Brahman  distinguishes  between  the  phenomenal 
self  and  the  real  self  which  is  not  affected  by  the  contin- 
gencies of  life,  and  asserts  immortality  of  this  real  self. 
Brahm  is  that  That  art  Thou.  It  is  the  immortality  of 
complete  identity  with  Brahm. 
33 


514  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

Whatever  may  be  true  of  early  Judaism,  in  its  later 
stages  the  belief  in  a  life  beyond  death  becomes  clear. 
After  the  period  of  the  Babylonian  captivity  there  can 
be  no  further  doubt  on  the  question,  and  at  the  time 
when  Jesus  taught  not  only  was  the  world  of  surviving 
souls  or  spirits  believed  in,  but  the  Jews  had  developed 
also  a  doctrine  of  the  resurrection  of  the  dead  body.  The 
Mohammedan  doctrine  of  immortality  may  be  regarded  as 
mainly  Hebrew  in  its  roots  although  it  doubtless  received 
some  stimulus  from  Christianity.  It  is  in  Christianity, 
however,  that  the  doctrine  of  immortality  has  received  its 
most  complete  development.  The  two  fundamentals  of  all 
religion  are  the  doctrines  of  God  and  the  human  soul. 
We  have  seen  that  while  the  doctrine  of  God  has  been 
largely  a  heritage  from  monotheism,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
doctrine  of  the  soul  has  developed  more  under  the  influence 
of  polytheism.  Christianity  fell  heir,  historically,  to  both 
lines  of  tendency,  being  vitally  related  to  both  monotheistic 
and  polytheistic  cults,  and  finding  in  its  central  idea  of  the 
mediational  function  of  the  Christ  a  point  of  synthesis  and  a 
point  of  development  for  both  its  theology  and  its  anthro- 
pology. Christianity  having  worked  out  an  ideal  scheme  of 
mediation  between  God  and  the  human  soul  is  in  a  position 
to  develop  ideally  also  a  doctrine  of  immortality  which  finds 
its  adequate  expression  in  the  symbol  of  inclusion,  the 
life  in  the  Christ  that  is  included  in  God.  The  symbol 
of  inclusion,  the  favorite  symbol  of  Christian  belief,  holds 
in  it  the  meaning  that  the  Indian  religions  seek  to  express 
in  identification  with  Brahm  or  the  Buddha,  the  difference 
being  that  Christianity  has  developed  in  its  doctrine  of 
mediation  a  more  vital  idea  of  relation  between  the  divine 
and  the  human,  so  that  when  it  comes  to  representing 
the  final  state  of  the  saved  soul  the  Christian  symbol  is 
found  to  be  more  clearly  consistent  with  the  idea  of  per- 
sonal immortality. 

In  showing  how  the  philosophical  forms  of  the  funda- 
mental religious  ideas  arise  in  the  various  religions,  it  has 


chap.  vii.  PHILOSOPHICAL  ASPECTS.  515 

not  been  my  purpose  to  treat  this  as  preliminary  to  a 
disquisition  in  the  field  of  pure  metaphysics.  The  aim 
has  been,  rather,  to  show  that  it  is  in  the  manifesta- 
tions of  the  religious  consciousness  that  we  are  to  look 
for  the  objective  working  out  of  these  ideas.  This  has  been 
in  pursuance  of  the  general  plan  of  this  part  of  our  inves- 
tigation. Starting  with  the  purely  physical  world,  we  - 
endeavored  to  show  how  the  concepts  and  methods  of 
physical  science  lead  on  to  a  point  or  to  points  where  their 
transcendence  becomes  obvious  and  the  metaphysical  inter- 
pretation of  the  world  becomes  necessary.  A  complete 
doctrine  of  physical  nature  thus  involves  a  synthesis  of  the 
mechanical  and  the  teleological.  Then  by  traversing  the 
rising  scale  of  the  sciences  through  biology,  psychology, 
sociology,  ethics  and  religion  we  found  a  progressive  de- 
mand for  synthesis.  Everywhere  we  found  the  categories 
and  methods  of  natural  science  applicable  and  necessary, 
but  nowhere  did  they  alone  prove  themselves  to  be  adequate. 
The  principle  of  natural  causation  and  of  scientific  ex- 
planation everywhere  called  for  its  complement  and  fel- 
low in  the  metaphysical  construction  of  the  world  under 
the  categories  of  thought  and  purpose.  It  was  only  in 
religion,  however,  that  we  were  able  to  complete  the  synthe- 
sis in  terms  of  the  concrete  and  to  connect  the  world  of  ma- 
terial phenomena  and  human  and  finite  purposes  with  an 
eternal  consciousness  in  whose  all-comprehending  thought 
and  purpose  they  are  grounded  and  reduced  to  rational 
unity.  In  religion  also  the  spirit  of  man  attains  to  certain 
fundamental  ideas  which  bring  its  life  into  unity  with 
the  divine  life. 


CHAPTER  VIII 


INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETEENAL. 


In  dealing  with  the  problem  of  existence  in  an  early  chap- 
ter, we  reached  a  conclusion  that  could  without  unfairness 
be  called  pluralism.  The  world  resolved  itself,  under 
analysis,  into  a  plurality  of  existents,  some  of  these,  objects, 
but  all  ejects  so  far  as  their  real  existence  was  con- 
cerned, except  the  self  that  knows,  whose  existence  is 
given  in  an  immediate  deliverance  of  consciousness.  The 
existent  that  is  not  an  eject  is,  therefore,  a  subject,  and  all 
objects  are  at  the  same  time  ejects.  From  another  point  of 
view,  also,  the  world  seemed  to  resolve  itself  into  pluralism. 
We  found  that  the  metaphysical  interpretation  of  the 
world  involves  the  translation  of  the  scientific  notion  of 
substances  or  grounds  of  phenomena,  into  the  notion  of 
idea-purpose  as  the  principle  of  teleological  agency.  But 
when  the  question  arose  as  to  whether  this  translation 
involved  the  postulate  of  some  unitary  idea-purpose  apart 
from,  or  transcending  the  plurality,  or,  a  plurality  of  idea- 
purposes  with  a  common  insight,  we  were  not  able  to  fully 
determine.  The  pluralistic  alternative  was  at  least  open. 
It  was  only  when  we  entered  the  world  of  sociality  and 
there  came  upon  a  form  of  community  which  had  at  its  basis 
a  plurality  of  conscious  agents,  that  we  found  the  condi- 
tions of  an  experimental  test  of  our  problem  available.  A 
stud}^  of  the  social  consciousness  was  sufficient,  however,  to 
convince  us  that  while   in  sociality  we  have   a  form  of 

516 


chap.  viii.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETERNAL.  517 

activity  revealed,  by  virtue  of  which  the  conscious  individ- 
ual is  able  to  transcend  the  walls  of  his  own  private  con- 
sciousness and  enter  into  the  conscious  lives  of  others ;  and 
by  virtue  of  which  the  social  organism  is  able  to  unify  the 
lives  of  its  members  through  the  medium  of  a  common  con- 
sciousness, yet  the  social  consciousness  is  able  to  solve  the 
problem  of  unification  only  partially  and  locally.  We 
saw  how  the  world-movements  as  a  whole  transcend  the 
guidance  of  calculable  social  forces,  and  we  found  it  neces- 
sary, in  order  to  prevent  our  social  world  from  falling  into 
the  hands  of  accident  and  blind  fate,  to  postulate  an  eternal 
consciousness,— one  that  was  all-comprehensive  and  that 
could  embrace  the  whole  in  the  scope  of  its  idea-purpose. 
The  postulate  of  the  eternal  consciousness  was  also  strength- 
ened by  the  fact  that  the  social  organism  fails  to  satisfy  or 
to  provide  satisfaction  for  some  of  the  most  fundamental 
interests  of  the  individual. 

It  was  only  when  we  entered  the  field  of  religion,  how- 
ever, that  we  found  ourselves,  in  our  religious  experience, 
brought  into  vital  relations  with  a  transcendent  being  who 
becomes  the  central  reality  of  our  religious  life  and  to 
whose  agency  and  relations  in  the  world  only  an  eternal 
consciousness,  one  that  determines  the  parts  through  the 
comprehension  of  the  whole,  would  be  commensurate.  This 
led,  as  we  have  seen,  to  the  affirmation  of  the  eternal  con- 
sciousness as  the  fundamental  attribute  of  the  deity  and  as 
the  bearer  of  his  transcendent  ideas  and  purposes. 

The  first  topic  of  this  chapter  is,  then,  the  eternal 
consciousness,  its  existence  and  mode  of  relating  itself 
to  the  wTorld  and  to  the  individual  existents  of  which  the 
world  is  composed.  The  judgment  that  an  eternal  conscious- 
ness exists  as  a  reality  distinct  from  the  social  conscious- 
ness and  the  consciousness  of  individuals,  has  two  roots, 
one  epistemological,  the  other  metaphysical.  The  episte- 
mological  root  brings  out  the  form  of  certitude  by  which 
the  judgment  of  existence  is  supported.  It  is  what  we  have 
called   cm    immediate  reflective  inference.     This   does  not 


518  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

seem  clear  in  connection  with  the  developed  idea  of  God, 
for  here  we  are  in  an  advanced  stage  of  reflection  where 
many  inferences  have  already  been  drawn.  If,  however,  we 
go  back  to  the  first  act  in  which  man  affirmed  the  transcend- 
ent, it  will  seem  to  be  an  immediate  inference  of  reflection. 
We  must  remember  that  religion  is  a  phenomenon  of  re- 
flection, and  that  the  datum  on  which  its  judgment  of  exist- 
ence is  pronounced  must  be  a  reflective  inference.  That  it  is 
a  first  and  immediate  inference  from  its  data  will  be  most 
obvious,  however,  in  view  of  the  theory  of  the  origin  of 
religion  which  has  been  developed  in  these  pages.  The  act 
in  which  reflection  and  religion  have  their  common  birth 
is  the  immediate  inference  of  a  transcendent  cause  of  a 
unique  experience.  This  inference  does  not  specifically 
affirm  an  eternal  consciousness,  but  it  does  assert  the  germ 
out  of  which  the  idea  of  the  eternal  consciousness  is  de- 
veloped. The  existence  of  the  eternal  consciousness  is  thus 
found  to  rest  on  an  immediate  reflective  inference,  a  fact 
that  is  inconsistent  with  the  intuitional  theory  of  divine 
knowledge.  Now  the  certitude  of  the  first  inference,  which 
the  apparent  pluralism  of  the  world  of  existents  may  seem 
to  impugn,  in  the  end  receives  metaphysical  confirmation 
from  all  the  considerations  which  have  already  been  ad- 
duced to  show  that  the  eternal  consciousness  is  necessary 
for  the  rational  grounding  of  the  world.  These  we  do  not 
need  to  repeat.  Metaphysically,  the  existence  of  an  eternal 
consciousness  is  necessary  as  the  subject  of  that  all-compre- 
hending thought-purpose  which  can  alone  prevent  the 
world  from  lapsing  into  irrational  chaos.  The  certitude 
with  which  the  existence  of  an  eternal  consciousness  is  held, 
is  not  one,  therefore,  which  rests  on  what  some  would  char- 
acterize as  a  basis  of  pure  speculation,  but  on  what,  when 
it  is  truly  apprehended,  becomes  genuine  rational  necessity. 
It  has  a  root  of  immediate  inference  lying  deep  down  at  the 
very  foundations  of  reflective  knowledge. 

How,  then,  is  this  existent  to  be  represented  as  related 
to  other  existents?     We  seem  to  face  a  species  of  dualism 


chap.  vin.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETEENAL.  519 

here  between  a  pluralistic  world  and  a  being  whose  unitary 
character  excludes  pluralism.  The  criticism  has  been  made 
on  pluralism,  which  is  a  phase  of  realism,  that  it  denies 
relation,  or  at  least  is  inconsistent  with  relation,  and  that 
it  denies  unity  and  is  atheistical.  The  first  charge  is 
answered  and  refuted  by  the  discovery  of  the  social  char- 
acter of  the  units  of  existence.  We  have  reduced  all 
existents  to  the  one  type  which  finds  its  analogue  in  the 
psychic,  and  have  found  the  relation  of  interpenetration  to 
be  constitutional  and  operative  even  below  the  plane  where 
sociality  proper  arises.  We  have  only  to  treat  our  units 
of  existence  with  real  insight  in  order  to  lift  them  out  of 
the  category  of  relationless  isolation.  The  charge  that 
unity  is  denied  and  that  the  theory  is  atheistic  is  answered 
in  part  by  the  insight  which  arises  in  the  religious  con- 
sciousness and  which,  under  the  guidance  of  motives  that 
are  already  familiar,  affirms  the  existence  and  necessary 
agency  in  the  world  of  a  consciousness  that  is  eternal.  We 
have  traced  the  roots  out  of  which  the  judgment  that 
affirms  this  existence  has  grown.  The  further  evidence 
will  arise  in  the  consideration  of  the  present  topic,  how  the 
eternal  relates  itself  to  the  world,  and  will  be  completed 
under  the  following  topic,  how  the  individual  relates  itself 
to  the  eternal.  That  part  of  our  doctrine  has  already  been 
developed  in  wiiich  it  is  shown  how  the  eternal  conscious- 
ness embodies  itself  in  an  all-comprehending  and,  there- 
fore, unitary  thought  and  purpose.  We  have  also  shown 
the  connection  of  purpose  with  interest  which  in  its  sub- 
jective reference  is  selective,  while  objectively,  as  a  prin- 
ciple of  existence,  it  is  conserving.  Starting  with  the  pre- 
sumption of  this  eternal  consciousness  as  relating  itself  to 
the  wTorld  as  a  wrhole  in  its  all-comprehending  purpose,  the 
question  here  is,  How  is  it  to  become  related  to  the  plurally 
existent  units  of  the  world?  The  answer  will  be  suggested 
by  another  question,  How  do  we  bring  our  general  concept, 
purpose  or  interest  which  attaches  to  a  scheme  as  a  whole, 
into  vital  relation  with  the  parts  and  details?     We  answer, 


520  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

of  course ;  by  splitting  up  these  universals  into  particulars, 
that  is,  by  developing  out  of  and  under  the  general-pur- 
pose, specialized-purposes  bearing  vitally  on  the  parts  or 
del  ails.  This  analogy  holds  here  and  no  other  is  at  all 
conceivable.  The  eternal  and  unitary  purpose  splits  up  or 
specializes  into  the  pluralistic  purposes  of  things.  The 
criticism  will  be  made  here,  however,  that  the  things  being 
presupposed  as  existents,  we  cannot  say  that  this  special- 
izing purpose  may  not  miss  them  and  hit  upon  some 
other  existents  instead?  But  who  said  they  were  there 
already?  On  the  contrary,  we  are  just  as  well  satisfied  to 
assume  their  non-existence.  It  is  the  relation  of  the  one  to 
the  hypothetical  many,  that  we  are  considering.  The  ques- 
tion is,  How  does  the  one  relate  itself  to  the  many?  And 
we  have  so  far  given  our  answer.  The  specialized  pur- 
poses are  the  purposes  of  these  very  existents. 

But  how  ?  you  may  ask ;  and  this  brings  up  the  question 
of  mode.  All  through  these  long  discussions  we  have  been 
maintaining  the  doctrine  that  agency  is  the  central  thing 
in  the  universe,  and  this  has  led  us  to  rejuvenate  the  idea 
of  cause  which  some  of  our  thinkers  are  disposed  to  discard 
as  useless  lumber.  But  causation  taken  as  embodying  the 
notion  of  agency  is  a  conception  without  which  no  kind  of 
science  beyond  mere  description  is  possible.  The  moment 
we  question  mere  fact  and  become  curious  about  how  the 
fact  came  to  be  or  to  be  there,  we  are  raising  the  question 
of  agency  and  a  question  of  agency  is  one  of  cause.  On 
this  general  ground  a  fundamental  distinction  has  been 
drawn  in  these  discussions  between  the  idea  of  natural  or 
physical  cause  and  that  of  final  or  teleological  cause,  a 
distinction  on  which  the  main  synthesis  of  our  work  de- 
pends. Let  us  suppose  that  the  one  has  specialized  itself 
into  the  many  thoughts  and  purposes  of  things;  the  how 
will  be  answered  here  by  taking  the  ground  that  the  energy 
or  agency  to  which  we  give  the  name  physical  cause  will  be 
included  in  the  form  of  agency  to  which  we  give  the  name 
of  purpose,  so  that  the  purpose  will  effect  its  immediate 


chap.  viii.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETERNAL.  521 

realization  in  the  form  of  physical  activity  just  as  the  pur- 
pose of  the  architect  is  realized  in  its  last  detail  by  the 
hammer  of  the  mason.  We  have  only  to  generalize  this 
example  in  order  to  see  how  the  divine  thought  and  pur- 
pose may  realize  itself  in  the  grounding  of  the  activities 
of  the  physical  world.  There  are  two  classes,  but  not  two 
different  species  of  existents,— the  physical  eject  and  the 
self  that  we  know  in  consciousness.  We  have  determined 
the  physical  eject  to  be,  broadly  speaking,  an  existent  of 
the  same  species  as  the  self,  its  physical  character  aris- 
ing out  of  its  undeveloped  spontaneity.  The  last  act  of 
the  eternal  consciousness,  then,  in  which  it  realizes  the 
physical  existent,  will  be  the  act  in  which  some  individ- 
ualized spring  of  spontaneity  will  begin  to  flow.  It  will 
be  an  institutive  act,  therefore, — not  simply  the  specialized 
idea-purpose  of  the  divine,— b ut  this  idea-purpose  as  a 
permanent  center  of  individual  energy.  Referring  back  to 
earlier  discussions,  we  saw  that,  in  developing  the  cate- 
gories of  the  physical  into  those  of  metaphysics,  the  step 
that  was  necessary  was  to  translate  the  notion  of  ground 
into  that  of  idea  and  the  notion  of  natural  cause  into  that 
of  finality.  That  conclusion  coincides  with  the  result 
reached  here.  In  both  cases  the  idea-purpose  grounds  the 
physical  activity. 

If  we  pass  to  the  conscious  self,  the  fundamental  rela- 
tions are  the  same.  But  there  are  also  important  differ- 
ences. The  self  is  a  conscious  individual  and  it  is  capable 
of  thoughts  and  purposes  of  its  own.  A  double  problem 
arises,  therefore,  in  its  case,  only  part  of  which  is  germane, 
however,  to  this  part  of  the  discussion.  We  wish  to  know 
its  existential  relation  to  the  divine,  and  also  the  relation 
of  its  thoughts  and  purposes  to  the  divine  thought  and 
purpose.  Now,  regarding  the  existential  relation,  we  have 
practically  the  same  thing  to  say  that  was  said  before.  The 
specialized  thought  and  purpose  of  the  divine  grounds 
individual  existence.  It  means  just  me  or  you,  and  this 
concentrated   meaning,   like   the   act   of   attention   in   psy- 


522  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

chology,  liberates  the  energy  that  I  am  conscious  of  as  my 
energy.  In  short,  the  divine  act  is  institutive  and  grounds 
that  center  of  existence  and  conscious  energy  which  I  call 
myself.  If  it  be  asked  whether  the  divine  thought-pur- 
pose that  institutes  me  is  identical  with  the  thoughts  and 
purposes  which  I  form  and  under  which  my  agency  is 
exercised,  I  am  forced  to  deny  this  identity  because  the 
divine  idea-purpose  institutes  me,  the  existent  self,  and  / 
am  conscious  of  being  more  than  the  sum  of  my  thoughts 
and  purposes.  There  is  a  permanent  background  or  in- 
root  of  these  thoughts  and  purposes,  which  is  also  included 
in  my  existence,  and.  it  is  an  existent  that  is  instituted. 
The  epist  etiological  relation  in  this  connection  is  also 
significant.  We  found  in  dealing  with  the  problem  of 
religious  knowledge  that  the  unqualified  use  of  the  prin- 
ciple of  self-analogy  in  representing  the  divine  nature  or 
attributes  leads  to  pure  anthropomorphism.  We  must 
qualify  all  our  conceptions  with  the  touch  of  transcendence 
in  order  that  they  may  be  valid  even  as  symbols.  If  the 
ontological  relation  between  the  conscious  self  and  the 
divine  idea-purpose  in  which  its  existence  finds  its  spring 
were  one  of  identity,  then  no  such  modification  of  concepts 
would  be  necessary.  The  modification  becomes  necessary 
because  the  relation  is  not  one  of  identity.  What  the  rela- 
tion is  I  do  not  attempt  here  to  fully  determine. 

Up  to  this  point  we  have  been  discussing  our  problem 
from  the  standpoint  of  the  eternal  and  its  relation  to  the 
individual,  or  rather,  its  mode  of  relating  itself  to  the  in- 
dividual. We  now  take  up  the  problem  from  the  stand- 
point of  the  individual  itself.  We  mean  by  an  individual, 
one  of  a  plurality  of  existents,  and  we  have  seen  that  these 
are  all  of  one  fundamental  type.  But  the  only  individual 
we  know  immediately  is  the  conscious  self  and  we  thus 
take  the  conscious  self  as  the  type  of  developed  indi- 
viduality in  general.  We  mean  by  an  individual,  then,  a 
self  that  realizes  its  agency  in  the  activity  of  thought- 
purpose  and  interest.     Now,  that  the  existence  of  the  self 


chap.  viii.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETERNAL.  523 

is  not  given  in  a  bare  presentative  intuition  is  evident 
enough.  In  the  first  place,  bare  presentative  existence  is 
an  abstraction,  and  only  the  mere  phenomenon  can  so 
exist.  But  the  self,  if  we  mean  by  it  the  individual  of 
which  we  are  conscious,  is  not  a  bare  phenomenon.  Des- 
cartes' cogito  ergo  sum  strikes  near  the  mark  but  still  out- 
side, for  while  he  identified  the  source  of  the  knowledge  of 
self-existence  with  a  function  of  self -activity  he  yet  consid- 
ered the  judgment  of  self -existence  a  spontaneous  infer- 
ence. It  is  not  this  but  an  intuition.  In  the  consciousness 
of  its  own  agency,— that  is,  in  that  conscious  self -assert  ive- 
ness  which  embodies  itself  in  thought,  purpose  and  interest, 
— the  self  has  an  immediate  awareness  of  its  own  existence. 
There  must  be  some  point  in  experience  where  we  touch 
real  existence  immediately  and  here  it  is.  But  the  episte- 
mological  datum  is  not  the  only  basis  of  our  assertion  of 
the  real  existence  of  the  individual  self.  It  is  confirmed  by 
the  process  by  which  the  self  defines  and  determines  its 
individuality  in  experience.  We  have  seen  how  it  defines 
itself  in  contra-distinct  ion  to  the  objective  world  as  an 
individual,  self -maintaining,  personal  subject  of  expe- 
rience, and  how  in  relation  to  the  objective  world  it  em- 
bodies its  agency  in  a  series  of  categories  which  determine 
the  forms  of  objective  existence.  We  have  also  followed 
the  process  by  which  it  unfolds  its  social,  ethical  and  re- 
ligious nature.  All  this  is  evidence  of  real  existence. 
There  is  also  metaphysical  evidence  in  the  grounds  of  per- 
durability  which  will  be  the  closing  topic  of  this  chapter. 
We  go  on,  then,  to  consider  the  relations  of  the  con- 
scious individual  to  other  forms  of  existence.  The  topic 
divides  naturally  into  two  questions  ;  (1)  that  of  the  relation 
of  this  individual  to  other  ejects  of  the  pluralistic  system ; 
(2)  the  question  of  its  relation  to  the  eternal.  In  dealing 
with  the  first  question,  let  us  assume  all  that  has  been  deter- 
mined heretofore  regarding  the  interaction  of  the  world- 
units.  We  find  in  our  analysis  of  consciousness  that  there 
is  fundamentally  only  one  form  of  existent,  the  psychic 


524  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

or  its  analogue,  and  one  mode  of  interaction,  that  with 
which  consciousness  makes  us  familiar.  This  determines 
the  relation  of  the  world-units  in  general  as  social  or 
the  analogue  of  social.  We  found  on  examining  the  form 
of  interaction  which  we  call  physical  and  mechanical,  that 
it  implies  a  more  internal  reaction  which  is  the  analogue 
of  the  social.  Assuming  this,  it  is  evident  that  our  plural- 
istic world  is  not  a  world  of  isolated  individuals,  but  a 
^  world  of  socially  related  individuals,  whose  very  nature  on 
the  side  of  r  elatedness  is  that  of  inter  penetration.  Each 
individual  is  penetrable  by  other  individuals  and  may 
enter  into  other  individuals.  This  is  the  basal  fact  of 
relation.  It  refutes  all  those  criticisms  of  pluralism  that  are 
founded  on  the  supposed  unrelatedness  of  the  units  of  the 
world.  Moreover,  it  is  essential  in  order  that  the  notion 
of  interpenetration  may  not  be  carried  to  extreme,  that  the 
self-assertiveness,  by  means  of  which  the  individual  keeps 
itself  in  being  by  the  exclusion  of  other  individuals,  should 
not  be  forgotten.  Interpenetration  is  achieved,  not  by 
aggression,  but  through  representation  and  sympathy,  and 
its  great  instruments  are  imitation  and  suggestion.  The 
great  lesson  we  need  to  learn  here  is  that  we  may  enter  into 
the  life  of  our  fellow  and  influence  it  to  any  extent  without 
ever  becoming  identical  with  him  or  actually  thinking  his 
thoughts,  purposing  his  designs  or  feeling  his  emotions. 
The  category  of  interpretation  is  not  identity  but  com- 
munity. "We  agree  here  with  an  observation  of  Hoffding 
that ' '  instead  of  marvelling  at  relation  we  ought  to  consider 
it  the  great  marvel  that  anything  should  be  unrelated." 

A  more  profound,  if  not  more  difficult  question  is 
that  of  the  relation  of  the  conscious  individual  to  the 
eternal.  We  have  endeavored  to  define  the  mode  by  which 
the  eternal  relates  itself  to  the  individual  through  an 
instituting  and  conserving  act.  But  we  have  seen  that 
institution  and  conservation  do  not  involve  identity. 
There  is  a  sameness,  but  there  is  a  difference  which  seems 
to  be  constitutional  also.     AA7e  are  dealing  with  the  whole 


chap.  vin.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETFKNAL.  525 

question  here.  In  order  to  determine  what  is  instituted 
and  conserved  we  must  harken  to  the  whole  lesson  of  ex- 
perience. It  is  not  a  matter  of  deduction  but  of  the  whole 
revelation  of  consciousness  to  science.  Here  the  world  of 
pluralism  has  its  rights.  It  says  that  the  many  shall  not 
be  offered  up  to  the  one.  They  are  real  existents  and  their 
agency  is  real.  Let  us  see,  then,  what  modus  vivendi  is 
possible  on  this  basis.  In  the  first  place,  then,  it  is  not  in 
the  first  instance  a  case  of  adaptation  to  a  one  that  already 
exists.  It  is  rather  the  question  whether  the  many  need 
the  one  and  must  have  it.  It  is  on  this  primary  consider- 
ation that  the  logic  of  the  whole  preceding  discussion  bears. 
Following  the  evolution  of  the  synthetic  method  from  first 
to  last,  beginning  in  physics  and  ending  in  religion,  we 
found  that  at  all  points  the  necessity  for  unification  was 
pressing.  At  any  point  in  the  compass,  without  the  one 
the  world  would  be  left  in  fragments  without  any  rational 
basis  for  plurality.  From  this  "great  argument"  we  con- 
clude to  the  necessity  of  the  one  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  many.  We  return,  then,  to  the  question  of  modus. 
If  the  one  is  needed  by  the  many  it  must  be  a  need  that 
arises  (1)  out  of  the  existence  and  (2)  out  of  the  function 
of  the  many.  Take  the  individual  unit  which  we  call  self. 
The  self  as  a  real  existent  will  require  the  presence  of  the 
one  in  that  divine  act  which  begets  existence  and  in  that 
divine  interest  which  begets  conservation.  The  individual 
self  must  be  instituted  and  conserved.  But  we  have 
contended  that  this  institutive  and  conserving  function  is 
not  one  that  involves  the  identity  of  the  self  instituted 
with  the  eternal  that  institutes.  The  self  is  not  simply 
ila  piece  of  the  absolute"  as  Koyce  says  (unguardedly  I 
think),  nor  is  the  self  simply  a  specialized  purpose  of  the 
absolute.  The  many  has  its  rights  and  the  self  is,  in  the 
first  place,  not  merely  a  specialized  purpose  of  the  abso- 
lute, but  rather  the  existent  which  this  specialized  purpose 
means  or  intends.  This  being  the  case,  the  relation  of  the 
self  to  the  absolute  is  not  that  simply  of  a  piece   that 


526  SYNTHESIS.  PAETH. 

represents  an  undivided  interest  in  a  whole.  It  is  the 
relation  of  an  instituted  individual,  itself  capable  of  hav- 
ing thoughts  and  purposes.  The  self  may  be  included  in 
the  absolute  and  its  existence  may  be  a  dependent,  because 
an  instituted,  existence,  but  its  complete  identification  with 
the  whole  or  a  part  of  the  absolute  is  something  that  can- 
not be  conceived.  Moreover,  this  means  the  swallowing  up 
of  the  many  by  the  one. 

Furthermore,  we  have  the  problem  of  the  relation  of 
the  individual  self  to  the  eternal,  as  this  problem  arises  out 
of  the  functions  of  the  individual  self.  The  self  is  a 
real  individual  which  realizes  its  agency  in  the  form 
of  thought-purpose  and  interest.  We  have  seen  how 
the  finiteness  of  this  agency  causes  it  to  fall  short  in 
its  relation  to  the  world-movements  as  a  whole  and  to 
postulate  an  eternal  thought  and  purpose  as  necessary 
to  the  unity  and  rationality  of  the  world.  In  view  of  this 
the  question  of  modus  comes  up.  How  are  the  divine 
idea-purposes  related  to  the  finite  idea-purposes  of  the  in- 
dividual? The  relation  here  cannot  be  one  of  identity, 
since  the  agency  of  the  individual  self  must  be  regarded  as 
real.  We  have  seen  already  that  the  reality  of  the  self 
precludes  its  identity  with  the  eternal.  In  like  manner, 
the  reality  of  its  agency  precludes  its  identity  with  the 
divine  agenc}^.  How,  then,  can  it  be  related?  We  have 
indicated  inclusion  as  the  idea  of  relation  that  is  favored 
here.  The  many  may  be  included  in  the  one  without  los- 
ing its  maniness  or  its  individuality.  But  the  modus  is 
the  pressing  question.  We  ask  in  view  of  this,  Are  the 
divine  purposes  always  victorious?  and  we  answer  in  the 
affirmative,  for  we  cannot  conceive  God  as  being  de- 
feated in  his  purpose.  Again,  we  ask,  Are  the  purposes  of 
the  many  defeated?  and  we  are  obliged  to  answer  that  they 
are  liable  to  be  defeated.  Aside  from  the  liability  to 
defeat  through  collision  with  other  individual  purposes, 
there  is  the  certainty  of  defeat  that  arises  from  the  pos- 
sibility  of   collision   with   the   divine   purpose.     But  how 


chap.  viii.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETEKNAL.  527 

can  the  individual  and  the  divine  purposes  collide?  This 
brings  us  back  again  to  the  question  of  relation.  We  may 
interpret  the  unfailing  realization  of  the  divine  purpose 
in  a  pluralistic  world  in  either  of  two  different  ways. 
We  may  say  that  there  are  really  not  two  purposes  but  one 
and  that  is  the  divine  purpose.  But  that  way  is  not  open 
to  us  who  have  recognized  the  reality  of  the  individual 
agency.  We  may  say,  on  the  other  hand,  that  the  two  pur- 
poses are  in  reality  two;  that  the  individual's  inception  of 
his  purpose  pertains  to  the  real  exercise  of  his  own  agency. 
This  gives  us  a  world  of  co-existing  purposes,  liable  to 
collide  but  one  of  which  is  predestined  to  victory.  Let  us 
ask  how  this  can  be.  Well,  in  the  first  place  it  is  the  pur- 
pose of  the  one  that  is  destined  to  triumph.  And  the  one 
includes  the  many.  This  fact  of  inclusion,  although  it  does 
not  identify  the  many  with  the  one  but  leaves  scope  for  free 
individuality,  is  yet  explanatory  of  the  problem  we  are  con- 
sidering. We  may  defeat  a  man  by  direct  opposition  and 
in  that  case  he  fails  of  the  immediate  realization  of  his  pur- 
pose ;  or  by  so  directing  the  agencies  which  he  also  employs 
to  compass  his  end,  that  they  will  be  tributary  to  a  final  out- 
come which  neutralizes  or  suppresses  his  end  and  realizes  the 
opposite.  The  latter  is  the  method  of  statesmanship.  The 
divine  purpose  contemplates  an  end  or  ends  to  be  realized 
and  we  cannot  doubt  of  their  realization.  But  finite  pur- 
poses also  exist  in  the  same  field  and  these  may  or  may  not  be 
realized.  Let  us  take  simply  the  finite  purpose  that  is  real- 
ized. This  may  be  either  in  harmony  with  or  opposed  to  the 
divine  purpose.  If  it  be  in  harmony,  no  special  problem  will 
arise.  But  if  it  be  opposed  and  is  yet  successful,  a  problem 
arises,  and  we  wish  to  know  how  in  such  a  case  the  divine 
plan  can  escape  defeat.  And  it  is  in  solution  of  this 
difficulty  that  we  have  pointed  to  the  method  of  statesman- 
ship. The  outward  agencies  by  which  purposes  are  real- 
ized have  the  quality  of  "publicity,"— they  are  open  to 
all,  — and  while  one  individual  may  seize  upon  them  and 
render  them  unavailable  for  other  individuals,  this  seques- 


528  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

tration  is  impossible  in  relation  to  the  eternal.  All  instru- 
mentalities are  open  to  the  eternal  and  so  his  purposes 
may  never  be  arrested  or  defeated.  In  the  world  of 
agency,  then,  the  individual  purpose  that  is  hostile  to  the 
divine  may  go  on  and  realize  its  immediate  end.  But 
it  cannot  compass  remote  or  ultimate  ends,  for  in  this  field 
the  divine  purpose  is  exclusive  and  to  it  the  efforts  of  in- 
dividuals, whether  in  harmony  or  in  opposition,  will  be 
found  to  have  been  tributary. 

We  come,  then,  to  the  final  problems  of  the  agency  and 
the  perdurability  of  the  individual  self.  Regarding  the 
question  of  agency  we  have  already  reached  some  conclu- 
sions,—that  agency  is  real  and  is  one  that  can  be  exer- 
cised without  clashing  with  the  divine  agency.  There  is 
a  place  in  our  world  for  real  individuality  and  pluralism 
does  not  need  to  be  sacrificed  to  considerations  of  unity. 
Now  what  we  mean  by  the  reality  of  individual  agency 
may  be  expressed  from  the  ethical  side  in  the  word  free- 
dom. There  is  in  the  world  a  place  for  the  exercise  of 
free  ethical  agency.  We  have  already  considered  this 
question  with  reference  to  the  individual's  relation  to  the 
world,  and  especially  in  connection  with  the  scope  and 
function  of  natural  causation.  And  we  have  seen  that  the 
self  determining  itself  to  action  as  a  subject  of  duty  is  a 
free  agent  and  a  vera  causa.  Man's  ethical  self-determin- 
ation brings  results  into  the  world  that  would  otherwise 
not  eventuate.  We  take  this  as  settled  and  the  question 
here  is,  Does  man  possess  freedom  with  reference  to  the 
eternal?  We  answer  yes,  but  subject  to  qualifications 
that  have  already  come  into  view.  Man  is  an  ethical  free 
cause  in  spite  of  his  relation  to  natural  causation.  But  in 
his  relation  to  the  eternal  he  is  a  free  cause  by  virtue  of 
his  existential  relation  to  the  divine.  This  is  a  hard  say- 
ing, but  I  think  it  worthy  of  all  acceptance.  Going  back 
to  our  former  discussion,  the  conclusions  there  which  are 
predetermining  here  were  the  distinction  we  found  it 
necessary  to  draw  between  the  specialized  purpose  of  the 


chap.  viii.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETEKNAL.  529 

eternal  and  the  existent  which  it  institutes ;  also  the  dis- 
tinction we  found  it  necessary  to  draw  between  the  idea- 
pnrpose  of  the  eternal,  and  individual  idea-purposes.  In 
neither  case  can  identity  be  asserted  but  in  both  cases  only 
the  inclusion  of  the  many  in  the  one.  Now  we  have  seen 
that  the  power  of  ethical  decision  rests  on  a  prior  assent 
of  the  individual  consciousness  to  the  ethical  demand  or 
law  as  obligatory.  This  assent  is  prior  to  ethical  choice, 
which  is  the  decision  to  do  one's  duty  in  the  specific  form 
in  which  duty  presses.  The  assent  is  that  fixation  of  eth- 
ical attitude  which  is  evidently  congenital  and  predeter- 
mined in  the  divine  act  by  which  we  were  instituted.  "We 
are  not  free  to  assent  or  not,  we  simply  assent.  Ethical 
choice,  however,  is  the  act  in  which  we  chose  to  do  or  not 
to  do  our  duty.  And  the  very  fact  that  we  are  free  to 
choose  not  to  do,  is  proof  of  our  liberty  here  in  our  relation 
with  the  eternal.  We  do  not  say  that  the  eternal  could 
not  constrain  us  here.  We  only  say  that  it  does  not  and 
that  ethical  choice  is  free  in  its  relation  to  the  divine  and 
therefore,  a  vera  causa.  It  is  possible  for  me  to  be  a  wicked 
man  and  yet  to  be  free  in  my  relation  to  God.  Though  I  am 
wicked  I  assent  to  duty.  This  has  not  been  left  to  my  option. 
But  I  may  choose  not  to  do  my  duty  and  I  may  work 
wickedness.  All  this  is  in  my  province.  I  thus  become  a 
vera  causa  and  bring  results  into  the  world  which  oppose  the 
eternal.  Nevertheless  my  wickedness  is  limited  and  God  is  not 
mocked.  For  the  wicked  man,  in  so  far  as  he  wills  wickedly, 
is  short-sighted,  not  seeing  that  all  instruments  are  open  to 
the  eternal  and  that,  too,  while  he  is  temporarily  realizing 
his  wicked  aim.  In  the  long  run  when  ultimate  results  are 
counted  he  will  find  that  the  instruments  which  he  used 
for  evil  have  conserved  the  good  end  which  he  hates. 

We  reach  here  the  final  theme  of  this  chapter,  that  of 
perdu  rabil  it  ij  or  the  problem  of  the  immortality  of  the  soul. 
A  study  of  the  history  of  religions  shows  that  the  belief  in 
the  continued  existence  of  the  soul  beyond  death  is  very 
old.  Tylor  in  his  Primitive  Culture  traces  its  develop- 
34 


530  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

ment  among  savages  from  what  he  calls  the  "continuance- 
theory"  to  the  "retribution-theory"  in  which  a  system  of 
eschatology  has  been  built  up  on  the  basis  of  continuity  of 
existence.  That  the  idea  and  the  belief  in  immortality 
are  deeply  imbedded  in  the  constitution  of  the  race  is  one  of 
the  most  evident  truths  of  history.  But  our  special  concern 
here  is  not  with  the  historical,  but  rather  the  philosophical 
aspect  of  the  subject.  "Why  should  man  covet  immortality, 
and  what  grounds  are  there  on  which  a  rational  conviction 
of  immortality  may  rest?  The  question  as  to  why  the  in- 
dividual should  covet  immortality  is  only  partially  open. 
Nature  seems  to  have  put  a  congenital  foreclosure  on  that 
question  so  far  as  the  normal  man  is  concerned.  To  the 
plain  man  the  cessation  of  life  is  an  end  to  be  avoided,  and 
just  as  he  looks  forward  to  to-morrow's  continuation  of  life 
as  desirable  so  he  looks  to  that  indefinite  continuation  that 
extends  beyond  death  as  desirable.  The  assent  to  im- 
mortality as  desirable  seems  to  be  congenital.  But  the 
question  may  be  raised  and  modern  pessimism  has  taught 
us  that  the  denial  of  the  desire  to  live  is  possible.  Why 
should  man  desire  a  continuance  of  existence?  Well,  a 
continuance  of  existence  means  more  life,  and  to  most  men 
more  life  is  desirable.  But  if  not,  then  more  life  means 
more  development.  To  the  one  who  would  perhaps  find 
a  high  kind  of  satisfaction  in  denying  the  mere  desire  for 
more  life,  the  prospect  of  more  development  would  be 
alluring,  particularly  when  this  development  is  connected 
with  high  moral  and  spiritual  ideals  whose  realization  is 
conditioned  on  this  continuance.  Finally,  if  through  re- 
ligion the  individual  has  come  to  include  his  life  in  that 
of  the  eternal,  it  is  inevitable  that  he  should  put  the  high- 
est value  on  that  conception  of  the  scope  of  life  which  is 
most  consistent  with  the  ideal  of  life  which  he  regards  as 
alone  of  supreme  value.  When  connected  with  this  higher 
outlook  it  would  seem  that  only  to  those  who  have  abso- 
lutely despaired  of  life  and  its  ideals  can  immortality 
seem  to  be  undesirable. 


chap.  viii.  INDIVIDUAL  AND  ETERNAL.  531 

We  may  ask,  then,  in  conclusion,  what  grounds  there 
are  for  a  rational  belief  in  immortality?  Well,  there 
is  the  almost  universal  belief  in  it  in  some  form  by  onr  race. 
This,  of  course,  may  have  very  little  force.  Then  there  is 
the  fact  that  science  not  only  has  nothing  to  say  against 
immortality,  but  certain  branches  of  investigation  seem 
to  be  discovering  facts  which  bear  in  favor  of  the 
ability  of  the  soul  to  survive  temporary  separation  from 
the  body.  Civilized  man  thus  seems  to  be  en  route  to- 
ward the  verification  of  one  of  the  early  stages  of  savage 
belief  in  its  development  of  the  doctrine  of  spirits.  But 
this  consideration  at  this  stage  may  be  regarded  as  of  at 
least  doubtful  value.  The  considerations  which  have  un- 
doubted value  are  chiefly  the  ethical,  religious  and  meta- 
physical. Regarding  the  ethical  reasons  for  belief  in  im- 
mortality, I  think  the  true  principle  of  evaluation  has  been 
struck  by  Kant  who  first  vindicated  that  view  of  ethics 
which  makes  the  ethical  ought  a  vera  causa  in  the  world  and 
man  a  free  agent  in  so  far  as  the  ethical  ought  becomes  his 
motive.  The  ethical  ought  is  simply  an  ideal  of  life  which 
is  to  be  realized  in  conduct  and  character  and  the  pressure 
of  this  ideal  is  in  the  direction  of  an  existence  that 
shall  be  commensurate  with  the  destiny  which  duty  imposes. 
Kant  says,  in  substance,  that  from  the  standpoint  of  moral 
ideals  the  life  immortal,  that  is,  the  life  not  determined  by 
temporal  limits,  is  not  simply  desirable,  it  is  a  rationally 
necessary  condition  of  the  validity  of  the  ethical  ideal. 
Let  us  take  this  as  the  evaluation  of  immortality  from 
the  ethical  standpoint.  Through  religion  we  are  brought 
into  relation  with  the  ethical  and  with  the  life  of  the 
eternal.  Religion  thus  inevitably  leads  to  the  subor- 
dination and  postponement  of  the  life  of  time  and  sense 
to  the  life  of  the  eternal  and  the  spiritual.  This  is  the 
only  life  that  has  value,  inasmuch  as  it  is  the  only  life  in 
which  we  can  come  into  close  relations  with  God.  Relig- 
iously, then,  the  immortal  or,  as  it  were  better  called  here, 
the  eternal  life,  is  not  only  desirable,  but  it  is  the  rationally 


532  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

necessary  condition  of  realizing  the  religious  ideal.  Meta- 
physically, the  eternal  life  is  the  life  of  the  whole.  It  is 
life  in  its  infinite  completeness.  In  its  ideal  spiritual 
aspirations  the  soul  looks  back  toward  its  roots  in  the 
divine  nature  as  well  as  forward  toward  the  ideal  fulfill- 
ment of  its  purposes  in  coalescence  with  the  purpose  of  the 
divine.  We  have  seen  that  the  individual  soul  is  ushered 
into  existence  by  the  eternal;  that  it  is  maintained  in 
existence  by  the  eternal  and  that  the  end  of  its  striving 
is  that  the  purpose  of  its  life  may  coalesce  with  the  purpose 
of  the  eternal.  To  such  a  being  the  ethical  and  the  re- 
ligious seem  to  be  but  broken  lights  of  immortality.  The 
whole  illumination  breaks  in  when  the  soul,  having  put 
all  the  partial  lights  together,  begins  to  realize  that  it 
is  hedged  around  with  the  divine  and  that  the  natural 
aspiration  of  a  being  like  itself  is  toward  the  eternal. 


CHAPTER   IX. 

SIN   AND    RETRIBUTION. 

There  is  a  distinction  to  be  made  between  sin  and  evil. 
Evil  is  the  genus  of  which  sin  is  the  species.  A  distinction 
is  also  to  be  recognized  between  two  senses  of  the  word 
good.  There  is  what  we  call  natural  good  because  it  is  that 
for  which  all  conscious  beings  strive.  This  is  satisfaction. 
Every  conscious  being  seeks  the  satisfaction  of  its  own  y 
nature.  And  since  satisfaction  lies  also  along  the  line  of 
conservation,— for  reasons  that  are  biologically  intelligible, 
—it  follows  that  every  conscious  being  naturally  seeks  the 
fullness  and  completeness  of  its  life.  Put  in  different  words, 
it  is  the  nature  of  living  things  to  seek  more  life.  Were 
the  lines  of  satisfaction  to  diverge,  however,  from  those  of 
life-conservation,  the  animal  would  continue  to  follow  the 
lines  of  satisfaction  unless  some  conflicting  motive  were  to 
arise  strong  enough  to  turn  it  again  into  the  channel  of 
life-conservation.  The  immediate  motive  and  end  of 
natural  good  is,  therefore,  satisfaction,  while  its  more  ulti- 
mate and  more  remote  end  is  life-conservation,  — an  end 
that  may  come  into  conflict  with  the  motive  of  satisfac- 
tion. We  reach  an  adequate  conception  of  natural  good, 
I  think,  in  the  idea  of  satisfaction  in  the  pursuit  of  life, 
and  inasmuch  as  the  consciousness  of  the  self  has  been 
found  to  include  that  of  its  other  as  well  as  the  satisfaction 
of  its  other,  we  may  still  further  qualify  our  conception  and 
say  that  natural  good  consists  in  self-satisfaction  in  the 

533 


534  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

pursuit  of  life.     Natural  evil  would  then  be  the  perdition 
of  this  self-satisfaction  in  the  pursuit  of  life. 

Let  us  apply  to  these  two  opposite  concepts  of  natural 
good  and  evil  as  thus  defined,  the  terms  happiness  and 
misery.  The  natural  good  of  conscious  beings  will  be 
happiness,  their  natural  evil,  misery.  But  natural  good 
is  to  be  distinguished  from  the  species  of  good  which  we 
may  call  wWra-natural,  not  in  any  transcendental  sense  of 
course,  but  in  view  of  the  fact  that  the  natural  man,  when 
we  get  down  to  him,  may  rebel  against  the  ultra-natural 
good  and  choose  to  follow  his  impulses.  This  good  might  be 
called  ethical  or  spiritual,  but  it  has  a  pre-ethical  or  non- 
ethical  stage.  We  have  seen  that  the  lines  of  immediate 
self-satisfaction  and  life-conservation  may  diverge,  or  at 
least  may  seem  to  diverge  and  come  into  conflict.  It  is  then 
that  the  issue  arises  between  the  motive  of  natural  good  and 
another  motive  arising  out  of  the  need  of  life-conservation, 
which,  so  far  as  it  prevails,  involves  a  temporary  inhibition 
at  least,  of  the  motive  of  happiness.  The  animal  possesses 
this  power  of  postponement  and  exercises  it  whenever  it 
abstains  from  a  present  gratification  in  view  of  something 
anticipated  in  the  future.  "We  have  no  reason,  however, 
for  supposing  that  the  animal  has  attained  to  any  abstract 
conceptions  of  life  by  virtue  of  which  it  makes  its  post- 
ponement. On  the  contrary,  the  motive  of  postponement 
will  be  of  the  same  species  as  that  of  immediate  satisfac- 
tion, only  stronger.  The  avoidance  of  the  evil  threatened, 
or  the  enjoyment  of  the  good  anticipated,  will  seem  to  be 
more  desirable  than  the  present  gratification.  The  remote 
end  will  promise  more  satisfaction  of  the  natural  desire 
than  does  the  present  yielding  to  impulse.  The  conse- 
quence will  be  that  the  impulse  to  present  enjoyment  is  in- 
hibited and  the  animal  practices  a  species  of  self-denial. 
All  this,  however,  may  with  reason  be  included  under  the 
notion  of  natural  good  and  we  may  regard  any  concept  of 
good  as  natural  that  does  not  involve  other  content 
than    the    satisfaction    of    natural    impulses    and    desires. 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  EETKIBUTION.  535 

The  notion  of  ultra-natural  good  originates  with  re- 
flection and  involves  the  function  of  abstract  ideas.  Let 
us  suppose  that  the  conscfous  being,  who  is  now  a  human 
in  some  stage  of  his  experience,  has  begun  to  reflect 
on  life  and  has  made  the  discovery  that  the  real  inter- 
est of  life  will  sometimes  come  into  conflict  with  the  hap- 
piness of  the  present.  Suppose  that  a  conflict  has  actually 
arisen  and  he  is  involved  in  the  Sturm  unci  Drang  of  con- 
flict. If  he  yield  to  the  natural  motives  he  will  decide  for 
the  present  happiness,  but  if  the  more  remote  life-interest 
prevail  he  will  be  conscious  of  having  inhibited  the  crav- 
ing of  the  natural  man  in  the  choice  he  has  made.  There 
need  not  be  any  ethical  element  in  such  a  choice;  it  may 
be  dictated  by  ordinary  prudence  or  regard  for  welfare, 
and  we  may  well  characterize  it  as  the  judgment  of  good 
sense. 

It  is  in  the  sphere  of  the  ethical  and  spiritual,  how- 
ever, that  the  distinction  between  natural  and  ultra- 
natural  good  becomes  clearly  defined.  In  the  ethical  situa- 
tion we  become  conscious  of  the  presence  of  a  new  factor,— 
not  simply  the  pressure  of  motives  of  happiness  which  in- 
volve considerations  of  prudence  and  good  sense,  but  the 
pressure  of  a  law  that  obliges  and  presses  with  the  uncom- 
promising force  of  duty.  The  ideal  of  good  which  presses 
with  the  force  of  obligation  and  to  which  we  assent  is  one 
whose  content  is  duty.  And  while  it  is  possible  to  trans- 
late even  the  ideal  of  duty  into  terms  of  self-realization 
and  through  this  to  relate  it  to  happiness,  we  undertake 
an  impossible  task  when  we  essay  to  identify  the  notions  of 
duty  and  happiness.  Duty  is  more  closely  identified  with 
the  notion  of  life-conservation  than  with  that  of  happiness 
and,  like  it,  may  come  into  even  sharper  conflict  with  the 
happiness-motive.  The  ethical  good  will  embody  itself  in 
forms  of  social  obligation  and  duty  which  involve  the 
inhibition  of  strictly  individual  ideals  of  good.  It  will  take 
on  still  higher  embodiments  in  the  sphere  of  religion  where 
it    culminates    in    the    concept    of    the    highest    good    as 


536  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

realized  in  the  unity  of  the  human  and  the  divine  in  a  life 
that  is  conceived  to  be  eternal.  The  higher  convictions 
will  find  their  ideal  fulfillment  in  this  highest  realization 
of  ultra-natural  good.  In  the  ideal  of  religion,  there- 
fore, the  elements  of  self-realization  and  happiness  are 
found  to  be  ideally  united. 

Evil  may  also  be  distinguished  as  of  two  species;  the 
species  natural  and  the  species  which  we  shall  call  ultra- 
natural,  or  moral  and  spiritual.  In  the  first  place,  what  do 
we  mean  by  the  term  evil?  We  have  seen  that  good  in  its 
completer  sense  means  more  life,— the  fuller  realization  of 
the  life-ideal.  The  idea  of  good  is  positive  and  construct- 
ive, therefore,  and  its  law  is  the  law  of  being  and  life. 
Anything  that  conserves  good  will  also  conserve  being  and 
life.  Whereas  anything  that  really  conserves  being  and 
life  ought  also  to  conserve  good.  Evil  is  the  opposite  of 
all  this :  it  is  negative  in  its  character  and  destructive 
rather  than  conserving.  Natural  evil  will  be  the  enemy  of 
life  and  happiness  and  will  embody  itself  in  such  forms 
as  pain,  suffering,  accident,  disease,  poverty  and  death. 
Everywhere  it  will  be  found  to  be  the  enemy  of  natural 
good  and  everywhere  the  struggle  for  the  realization  of 
the  good  will  be  a  struggle  to  overcome  and  suppress  the 
evil.  Let  us  briefly  consider  at  this  point  these  various 
forms  of  natural  evil.  As  to  pain,  no  one  denies  that  it  is 
an  evil,  but  this  is  to  be  said  regarding  both  pain  and 
pleasure.  In  themselves  they  are  simply  original  forms 
of  consciousness  and,  like  other  forms,— like  conscious- 
ness itself  for  that  matter, — are  neither  good  nor  evil. 
What  I  mean  to  say  is  that  it  would  be  absurd  to  call 
any  of  the  primary  forms  of  activity  which  our  world 
presents,  either  good  or  evil.  They  are  there  simply  as 
first  data  from  which  all  our  concepts  of  good  and  evil  are 
to  be  determined.  We  can  only  determine  the  good  and 
evil  in  view  of  some  aim,  happiness  or  life-conservation, 
which  conscious  beings  place  before  them  as  objects  of 
realization.     We  have  seen  that  the  natural  object  of  con- 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  KETRIBUTION.  537 

scions  striving  is  happiness,  or  more  completely  stated,  a 
fullness  of  life  that  conserves  happiness,  and  that  natural 
good  and  evil  are  to  be  determined  with  reference  to  this 
end.  Now  pain  and  pleasure  are  not  so  much  evil  and 
good  in  themselves  as  the  primary  elements  of  the  conscious 
world  out  of  which  arise  those  secondary  reactions  in  which 
our  conceptions  of  good  and  evil  are  formed.  Pain  is  an 
elementary  fact  in  the  world  and  cannot,  as  such,  in  what 
we  may  call  its  first  intention,  be  regarded  as  either  good 
or  evil.  Taking  it  in  a  second  intention,  that  is,  as  related 
to  the  life-movements  by  which  natural  good  is  realized, 
pain  may  be  regarded  as  either  good  or  evil.  As  a  sentinel 
standing  guard  between  the  use  and  misuse,  between  the 
normal  and  the  excessive  exercise,  of  the  life  functions, 
pain  is  a  good,  inasmuch  as  it  is  the  co-efficient  of  excess  or 
abnormality  which  nature  employs  in  order  to  ward  off 
evil  and  conserve  the  good.  In  such  a  case  we  do  not  say 
that  pain  is  evil  either  in  its  first  or  second  intention.  It 
is  disciplinary  and  regulative,  and  no  affliction  even  of  the 
disciplinary  kind  is  for  the  present  joyous  but  grievous. 
We  may  then  exclude  pain,  as  nature's  life-warden,  from 
the  category  of  evil.  It  is  only  when  pain  embodies  itself 
physically  in  some  form  of  disease,  or  in  poverty  or  some 
emotional  form  such  as  misery  or  wretchedness,  that  it 
can  be  properly  called  an  evil  and  dealt  with  as  such.  The 
reason  of  this  is  obvious  for  it  is  only  in  these  forms  that 
its  hurtful  bearing  on  life  and  happiness  can  be  clearly 
made  out. 

We  have  remaining,  then,  the  dismal  sisterhood,  suf- 
fering, accident,  poverty,  disease  and  death.  Of  these 
it  may  be  said  that  suffering  is  the  form  which  pain  takes 
when  it  ceases  to  be  instrumental  and  becomes  negative  and 
destructive.  It  is  true  that  even  suffering  may  have  its 
uses  and  may  lead  to  good,— to  a  good  of  the  highest  spirit- 
ual quality.  The  road  of  suffering  may  be  the  pathway  to 
the  highest  sainthood.  But  we  are  considering  it  here  in 
relation  only  to  natural  good,  that  is,  the  conservation  of 


538  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

natural  life  and  happiness,  and  it  is  clear  that  when  the 
moral  and  spiritual  perspective  is  eliminated  the  prospect 
becomes  one  of  pure  evil.  Suffering  is  an  incubus  and 
must  in  some  way  be  thrown  off  or  removed  before  the 
good  can  be  attained.  We  have  to  repeat  here  that  what 
we  are  saying  has  reference  strictly  to  what  has  been  called 
natural  good.  If  we  include  within  our  perspective  the 
higher  issues  of  life,  then  it  would  cease  to  be  true  in  a 
measure  that  suffering  is  an  evil.  It  would  only  be 
irremediable  suffering,  or  suffering  that  is  serving  no 
good  purpose,  that  could  be  called  unmixed  evil.  But 
from  the  point  of  view  of  natural  good,— that  of  the  na- 
turalist and  the  physician,— while  pain  may  be  a  means  of 
health  as  the  surgeon  will  testify,  yet  suffering  is  some- 
thing to  be  relieved  and  eliminated  as  a  menace  to  the  in- 
terests of  life. 

If  we  turn  to  the  next  of  the  dismal  sisterhood,  the  cate- 
gory of  accident,  it  must  of  course  be  recognized  that  there 
is  a  point  of  view  from  which  neither  science  nor  metaphys- 
ics can  recognize  accident.  If  the  world  be  rational  through 
and  through,  then  it  must  be  true  that  every  event  has  its 
reason  somewhere  in  the  system  and  that  every  movement  of 
the  world  is  included  in  some  purpose.  It  is  possible,  how- 
ever, to  be  perfectly  sound  in  this  faith  and  at  the  same  time 
to  recognize  the  reality  of  that  point  of  view  from  which  the 
world  becomes  a  theatre  of  accident  and  caprice.  We  cannot, 
of  course,  regard  this  aspect  of  the  world  as  representing  its 
absolute  character,  for  to  the  absolute  there  will  be  nothing 
accidental  or  capricious ;  but  it  may  be  real  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  finite,  and  in  fact  it  is  an  aspect  of  experience 
which  cannot  be  denied.  We  have  to  ask,  then,  how  accident 
may  enter  into  the  world  and  in  what  sense  it  is  to  be  re- 
garded as  evil.  If  we  conceive  a  multitude  of  finite  individ- 
uals prosecuting  a  plurality  of  finite  purposes,  it  is  possible, 
in  the  first  place,  that  these  purposes  have  not  been  complete- 
ly co-ordinated,  and,  in  the  second  place,  that  any  or  all  of 
them   may  have  been   developed  without   full  knowledge 


chap.  IX.  SIN  AND  RETRIBUTION.  539 

and  regard  for  the  material  forces  which  surround  them. 
Two  kinds  of  clash  are  possible,  therefore,  wholly  outside 
the  sphere  of  intention  and  perhaps,  and  also,  of  prevision, 
—the  clash  of  individual  uncoordinated  purposes  with  one 
another  and  the  clash  of  conscious  purposes  with  unantici- 
pated material  forces.  This  analysis  might  be  carried 
farther  and  sources  of  unforeseen  clash  be  pointed  out  be- 
tween individual  purposes  and  those  purposes  in  which  the 
common  interest,  social  or  political,  embodies  itself;  but 
the  principle  of  the  representation  is  clear.  Now  it  is 
evident  that  these  clashes  may  arise  beyond  the  sphere 
of  finite  intention  or  prevision  and  that  so  far  as  the 
agency  of  the  finite  individuals  is  concerned,  they  happen 
without  design  and  will  be  accidental.  Nor  can  we  be 
sure  that  this  feature  of  accident  will  be  removed  com- 
pletely even  by  the  co-ordination  of  the  absolute  purpose, 
for  we  have  seen  that  the  absolute  purpose  realizes  itself 
by  comprehending  and  co-ordinating  the  activities  of  the 
finite  agents  under  a  final  unitary  end  in  which  the  good 
of  the  finite  is  conserved  and  realized.  This  does  not, 
however,  involve  the  suppression  of  the  accidental  in  the 
sphere  where  it  arises.  There  is  a  true  sense  in  which  acci- 
dent is  a  final  and  irremediable  category  of  the  finite,  and 
it  is  in  this  sense  that  it  is  to  be  regarded  as  evil.  If  acci- 
dent were  mere  appearance,  or  if  the  sweep  of  the  infinite 
removed  it  from  the  finite  sphere  so  that  it  became  a  mere 
passing  phase  of  things,  it  could  scarcely  be  called  evil  in 
any  serious  sense.  But  if  the  clash  of  accident  be  a  con- 
stitutional peril  of  our  finitude  and  threaten  us  per- 
manently, the  case  is  different  and  it  is  possible  to  see  in  it 
a  ground  of  justification  for  the  pessimist's  despair  of  the 
world.  If  we  are  everlastingly  exposed  to  the  peril  of  the 
overthrow  of  our  plans  by  forces  that,  so  far  as  finite 
agents  are  concerned,  are  extra-intentional,  then  there  is  a 
very  real  sense  in  which  our  whole  finite  world  becomes 
the  victim  of  caprice,  and  a  keen  appreciation  of  this  is 
very  likely  to  drive  men  into  pessimism.     In  view  of  the 


540  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

reality  of  accident,  it  is  not  difficult  to  see  how  it  is  to  be 
regarded  as  an  evil.  There  is  nothing  constructive  in  acci- 
dent; it  is  purely  destructive;  it  interferes  with  and 
thwarts  the  good  purpose  and  takes  its  place,  therefore, 
among  the  forms  of  objective  evil. 

The  third  of  the  dismal  sisterhood  which  we  are  con- 
sidering is  poverty,  and  we  have  to  determine  here  in  what 
sense  poverty  is  to  be  regarded  as  an  evil.  There  can  be 
no  question  that  poverty  causes  the  most  acute  suffering 
and  is  thus  the  occasion  of  evil.  Poverty  is  simply  the 
excessive  limitation  or  restriction  of  man's  power  over  the 
external  means  that  are  necessary  for  the  realization  of  his 
good.  There  are  restrictions  and  limitations  which  are  in- 
cident to  our  fmitude  and  which,  in  order  to  overcome  them 
completely,  it  would  be  necessary  for  us  to  become  infinite. 
But  poverty  is  an  extreme  and  abnormal  restriction  of  re- 
sources, a  restriction  which  goes  to  such  excess  that  the 
individual  is  no  longer  able  to  command  the  normal  re- 
sources for  realizing  its  finite  good.  In  this  sense  it  is 
clear  that  poverty  is  an  evil.  It  tends  to  the  defeat  of  the 
good  and  to  so  eliminate  the  elements  of  satisfaction  out 
of  life,  that  life  itself  loses  most  of  its  value  and  the  victim 
of  extreme  poverty  looks  forward  to  death  as  a  welcome 
release.  In  so  representing  poverty  we  do  not  overlook  the 
fact  that,  like  adversity,  it  has  its  uses  and  that  some  of 
the  highest  moral  and  spiritual  results  may  be  attained  in 
the  struggle  with  poverty;  but  it  still  remains  true  that 
poverty  in  itself  is  a  natural  evil  and  that  it  only  becomes 
a  means  of  good  when  it  is  connected  with  a  life-purpose 
in  which  moral  and  spiritual  ends  are  supreme. 

We  come  at  length  to  the  twin  sisters,  disease  and 
death,  which  together  seem  to  monopolize  the  whole  fore- 
ground of  our  world.  That  disease  is  an  evil  the  rankest 
folly  would  not  deny.  Disease  in  its  very  essence  is  a 
parasite  and  an  incubus;  it  is  something  that  destroys  the 
forces  of  life  and  blocks  the  way  of  the  individual  to  the 
realization  of  his  good.     Disease  means  the  decay  of  the 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  RETRIBUTION.  541 

physical  and  through  it  the  derangement  of  the  mental. 
Disease  is  the  prelude  to  suffering  and  death  and  it  is  so 
prevalent  that  it  constitutes  a  whole  aspect  of  the  world. 
Just  as  accident  and  caprice  from  one  point  of  view  affect 
the  whole  of  life,  so  disease  is  a  constant  menace,  if  not  an 
actual  affliction.  And  death— what  shall  we  say  of  it? 
Death  is  a  mystery;  but  externally  it  is  the  defeat  of  life, 
the  destruction  of  the  individual  so  far  as  he  is  a  physical 
organism;  the  absolute  termination  of  his  struggle  toward 
the  realization  of  the  good.  "Who  will  show  us  any  good 
in  the  grave  whither  we  are  all  tending?"  is  the  lament  of 
the  human  spirit  in  view  of  this  perdition  of  all  its  hopes. 
It  is  clear  that  in  death  we  meet  a  form  of  evil  for  which 
there  is  no  natural  remedy.  It  is  rather  one  of  those  facts 
which  in  itself  seems  to  be  as  primary  as  life.  Yet, 
like  pain,  in  its  first  intention  it  can  scarcely  be  regarded  as 
either  good  or  evil.  It  is  simply  one  of  the  data  in  view 
of  which  good  and  evil  are  to  be  determined.  It  is  only 
in  relation  to  life  and  as  the  apparent  destroyer  and  con- 
queror of  all  life's  aspirations  and  ends,  that  it  becomes 
the  symbol  of  the  greatest  evil.  AAHiether  it  be  what  it 
seems  to  be,  there  is  no  means  of  determining  from  the 
plane  of  mere  natural  good  and  evil.  The  problem-  of 
death  belongs  rather  to  the  plane  of  the  moral  and  spirit- 
ual. 

Leaving  death  out  of  account,  however,  and  bearing  in 
mind  that  pain  is  an  evil  only  when  it  embodies  itself  in 
some  form  of  suffering  or  disease,  the  point  on  which  we 
wish  to  put  the  emphasis  here  is  the  fact  that  all  these 
forms  of  natural  evil  are  remediable.  They  do  not  in  any 
aspect  of  them  present  a  hopeless  problem  as  though  the 
world  had  somehow  been  fashioned  by  an  evil  deity. 
Doubtless  they  present  grave  issues  and  there  is  some  rea- 
son for  the  pessimist's  cry  of  despair.  But  they  are  not 
irremediable.  Natural  evil  presents  a  problem  for  natural 
science  as  well  as  a  task  for  the  philanthropist.  It  is 
open  to  science  not  only  to  understand  and  theorize  these 


542  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

evils,  but  also  to  fight  them,  to  discover  the  means  of  re- 
moving their  conditions  and  the  kind  of  medication  that 
is  needed  to  restore  health  and  happiness.  It  is  the  busi- 
ness of  philanthrophy  to  bring  all  its  resources  to  the 
task  of  intelligently  fighting  and  removing  these  evils 
both  in  their  social  and  individual  forms.  And  it  is  the 
business  of  the  individual  outside  of  the  scientific  and 
philanthropic  spheres  of  action  to  fight  the  battle  of  life 
against  these  evils  in  so  far  as  they  are  personal  to  himself. 
They  embody  the  great  adversary  which  he  has  to  over- 
come and  it  is  out  of  the  struggle  to  overcome  that  is  to 
come  the  choicest  good  of  his  own  life. 

We  have  distinguished  between  the  two  species  of  good 
and  evil,  the  natural  and  the  ultra-natural,  and  have 
treated  briefly  of  natural  evil.  The  species  which  we  have 
called  ultra-natural  and  which  is  ordinarily  considered 
under  the  category  of  moral  evil, — is  one  that  is  rooted  in 
ethical  soil,  but  in  some  of  its  most  important  aspects  be- 
longs more  to  religion  than  to  ethics.  Moral  evil  arises 
in  the  subjective  sphere  of  choice  and  volition ;  it  is  partly 
a  matter  of  attitude.  Kant  put  supreme  emphasis  on  this 
fact  when  he  affirmed  that  there  is  nothing  unqualifiedly 
good  except  a  good  will.  He  meant  that  the  principle  of 
all  moral  good  is  the  good  will,— the  will  that  assents  to 
the  good  and  that  wills  it  in  a  law  that  is  to  bind  itself  and 
all  other  moral  beings.  Now  moral  evil  has  its  spring 
on  the  subjective  side  and  is  primarily  an  attitude  of 
■dissent  from  the  good.  We  have  already  considered  the 
question  of  the  possibility  of  such  a  dissent  from  the  good. 
It  arises  in  the  presence  of  duty  which  presses  and 
the  obligatoriness  of  which  we  recognize,  but  which  we 
nevertheless  choose  not  to  perform.  Recognizing  some 
conduct  as  our  duty  we  nevertheless  refuse  to  perform  it 
and  choose  some  other  content  for  our  ideal  of  good.  Moral 
evil  arises  and  we  become  morally  bad  men  when,  knowing 
the  good,  we  choose  to  disobey  the  law  and  to  do  that  which 
is  evil.     It  is  important  of  course  to  distinguish  between 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  RETRIBUTION.  543 

the  subjective  and  objective  aspects  of  moral  evil,  for  to 
will  the  good  is  not  sufficient  unless  we  are  also  scrupulous 
in  determining  what  the  good  is.  The  good  intention  may 
be  linked  with  bad  performance.  In  this  case,  however, 
we  do  not  call  the  agent  a  bad  man  even  though  we  should 
conclude  that  he  ought  to  be  restrained  behind  prison 
bars.  Where  the  will  is  unmistakably  good,  the  attitude 
of  the  agent  is  fixed.  He  wills  the  good  although  folly 
or  short-sightedness  or  stupidity  or  some  other  unethical 
cause  may  connect  this  attitude  with  bad  performance. 
We  recognize  the  accidental  character  of  the  combination 
and  proceed  to  remove  its  unethical  causes. 

The  idea  of  sin  is  not  inseparable  from  that  of  moral 
obliquity,  although  it  is  closely  allied  with  it.  We  do 
not  characterize  as  sins  ordinary  transgressions  of  moral 
law.  It  is  only  when  these  transgressions  are  heinous,  as 
in  the  case  of  lying  or  murder,  that  we  are  in  the  habit  of 
calling  them  sins.  In  fact,  there  is  a  personal  implica- 
tion in  sin  that  is  not  found  in  the  notion  of  ordinary 
moral  transgression.  We  sin  against  another  when  we  in- 
flict some  grievous  personal  wrong,  and  we  sin  against 
the  state  when  we  commit  treason  which  possesses  nearly 
all  the  characteristics  of  a  personal  outrage.  The  idea  of 
sin  is  more  distinctively  religious,  therefore,  than  ethical. 
We  have  the  sense  of  wrong-doing  when  we  disobey  the 
law  of  duty.  We  have  the  sense  of  having  sinned  in  the 
full  meaning  of  the  word  only  when  we  have  neglected  or 
disobeyed  the  law  of  God.  The  law  we  break  when  we  sin 
must  be  a  law  at  least  which  has  a  divine  sanction,  and  it  is 
this  no  doubt  that  has  brought  the  sense  of  sin  into  con- 
nection with  some  offenses  against  laws  and  ordinances 
that  are  not  directly  divine  institutions.  But  the  laws  of 
the  family  and  the  state  bear  in  general  to  the  religious 
mind,  the  divine  sanction,  and  their  violation  gives  rise  in 
it  to  a  certain  sense  of  sin.  After  all,  however,  the  sense 
of  sin  has  a  distinctively  religious  root.  The  Hebrew 
king    and    poet,    after    committing    the    most    outrageous 


544  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

crimes  against  his  fellow  men,  is  able  to  say  in  his  contri- 
tion before  God,  "  Against  Thee  and  Thee  only  have  I 
sinned."  We  have  only  to  take  the  religions  attitude  in 
order  to  understand  the  sincerity  of  the  utterance.  David 
is  a  murderer  and  an  adulterer,  reeking  with  blood  and 
impurity.  How  can  he  appear  before  a  pure  and  holy 
God  who  hates  sin  and  defilement?  However  atrocious 
his  offenses  against  his  fellows,  his  offense  against  God 
is  infinitely  blacker  and  more  heinous. 

In  another  chapter  we  have  considered  the  definition 
of  sin  in  both  its  negative  and  positive  aspects.  We  saw 
how  it  includes  in  its  notion  both  the  functional  and  the 
congenital  points  of  view.  If  man  be  a  sinner  at  all  he  is  a 
profound  one  and  his  sin  must  be  connected  with  the 
congenital  conditions  of  his  life  as  well  as  with  the  sphere 
of  conduct.  For  the  historic  roots  of  sin  we  should  have 
to  look  back  to  the  origin  of  his  experience  as  a  religious 
being,  while  for  its  psychological  and  biological  roots  we 
must  look  into  the  depths  of  his  nature.  Let  us  consider 
some  of  the  psychological  roots  of  sin  and  then  ask  the 
question  as  to  its  historical  origin.  Our  analysis  of  the 
ideas  of  good  and  evil  has  led  to  the  distinction  between 
natural  and  ultra-natural  good.  We  saw  also  how  con- 
flict might  arise  between  the  motives  of  the  natural  and 
the  ethical  motives  of  duty.  Moreover,  the  conflict  may 
be  carried  up  into  the  religious  plane  and  the  issue  may  be 
one  of  natural  impulse  or  some  ideal  of  natural  good,  versus 
the  divine  will  or  law.  Here  we  have  a  spring  out  of  which 
sin  may  emerge,  for  impulse  and  desire  may  pull  against 
the  divine  command  and  the  soul,  while  it  assents  to  the 
divine  law,  may  chose  the  natural  good  and  disobey  God. 
Thus  sin  would  originate.  Again,  man  is  a  finite  and  an 
imperfectly  developed  creature.  His  finitude  expresses 
itself  in  the  limitation  of  his  powers  and  in  his  imperfec- 
tion, in  the  possession  of  a  constitution  that,  at  the  present 
stage  of  its  development  at  least,  shows  a  kind  of  tilt  or 
overbalance   in  the   direction   of  the   purely  natural  and 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  EETKIBUTION.  545 

sensuous  life.  In  addition  to  this  natural  tilt,  which  is 
of  course  congenital,  there  are  certain  special  congenital 
predispositions  which  are  hereditary  and  which  give  the 
organisms  inheriting  them  a  strong  bent  toward  some 
form  of  the  natural  life  that  would  be  abnormal  and 
criminal.  There  is  thus  the  normal  tilt  and,  in  addition 
to  this,  the  abnormal,  both  of  which  may  be  regarded  as 
constituting  congenital  predispositions  to  sin.  If  we  com- 
bine the  strictly  psychological  with  the  biological  and  con- 
genital roots,  we  shall  not  be  at  a  loss  to  understand  how 
man  can  be  by  nature  a  sinful  being. 

For  the  historical  origin  of  sin  as  a  feature  of  the  life 
of  humanity  we  must  look  back  toward  the  point  where  the 
religious  experience  of  the  race  began.  Without  debating 
the  question  how  or  when  that  experience  arose,  we  are  in  a 
position  to  say  with  great  certainty  that  religion  would 
not  long  antedate  the  appearance  of  sin  in  the  world. 
Why  do  we  say  this?  Simply  in  view  of  the  study  we 
have  made  of  the  roots  of  sin  in  man 's  nature.  With ' 
the  tilt  in  favor  of  the  natural  and  the  sensuous,  the 
primitive  man,  whoever  he  was  and  wherever  he  first 
became  a  religious  being,  found  himself  in  a  position 
where  a  struggle  would  inevitably  arise  between  his  natural 
will  and  the  divine  command.  It  is  the  general  psycho- 
logical situation  that  supplies  the  basis  of  positive  judg- 
ment here  and  not  any  local  circumstance  of  time,  and 
place,  and  conditions  of  origin.  All  we  need  to  know  is 
the  psychological  and  biological  facts  about  the  nature  of 
man,  and  all  the  rest  will  be  clear. 

We  have  already  indicated  what  theory  of  primitive  man 
seems  to  be  most  in  consonance  with  the  facts  of  history,  so 
far  as  they  can  be  ascertained.  The  stage  of  history  which 
the  study  of  the  lower  races  is  opening  up  to  us  is  that  of 
savagery.  The  age  of  savagery  is  followed  by  that  of  bar- 
barism. Above  the  latter  we  have  the  era  of  civilization.  In 
the  age  of  savagery,  judging  by  the  facts  that  are  available, 
the  great  business  was  the  development  of  the  religions 
35 


546  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

of  the  peoples.  Everything  else  seemed  to  depend  on  re- 
ligion. The  great  business  of  barbarism  was,  however, 
the  origin  and  building  up  of  the  various  forms  of  political 
control.  Men  had  to  be  forced  violently  together  in  large 
masses  in  order  that  the  political  instinct  might  be  de- 
veloped into  cohesiveness.  The  age  of  civilization  is  that 
of  the  synthetic  development  and  flowering  of  all  the  ele- 
ments of  life  and  culture.  If  we  be  guided  here  by  a  great 
analogy,  we  shall  find  in  the  period  before  that  of  the 
savagery  that  we  know,  an  age  which  we  may  call  that  of 
primitive  man,  a  period  of  the  origins  of  the  elements  of 
human  as  distinguished  from  animal  life.  The  great 
epochal  step  in  connection  with  all  these  origins  would  be 
the  rise  of  man  out  of  the  condition  of  animal  spontaneity 
where  he  is  incapable  of  abstract  ideas  of  reflection,  to 
the  level  of  a  reflecting  being.  We  have  given  our  reasons 
for  thinking  that  this  step  is  the  one  in  which  religion 
would  originate.  Putting  this  in  other  language,  we  have 
given  reasons  for  thinking  that  man's  first  act  of  reflection 
would  constitute  him  a  religious  being,  inasmuch  as  only 
the  extraordinary  phenomena  connected  with  the  awaken- 
ing of  the  religious  consciousness  would  be  adequate  to 
effectively  break  the  crust  of  his  spontaneity.  The  first 
religious  man  would  be  the  genius  of  his  tribe  or  race,  and 
his  tutorship  would  be  instrumental  in  leading  his  fellows 
from  the  animal  life  to  that  of  religion.  The  only  other 
supposition  that  could  be  advanced  here  is  that,  after 
man  reached  the  human  stage  of  reflection,  there  was 
a  period  when  he  was  non-religious.  Then  he  discovered 
religion.  But  what  of  this  non-religious  stage?  How,  in 
fact,  could  he  break  the  shell  of  his  animality  if  not  through 
the  shock  of  the  religious  experience?  Bear  in  mind  that 
there  are  absolutely  no  facts,  and  that  any  theory  of  origin 
is  hypothetical.  But  in  the  present  day  if  the  event  of 
some  tribe  of  animals  breaking  the  crust  of  their  animality 
and  becoming  human  in  their  intelligence  should  occur, 
how  should  we  expect  it  to  happen?  by  a  simultaneous  break 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  RETRIBUTION.  547 

all  along*  the  line  and  without  any  unusual  motive?  or 
should  we  expect  that  the  initiative  would  be  taken  by  some 
genius,  or  group  of  geniuses,  the  most  gifted  of  the  tribe, 
under  some  tremendous  stimulus  ?  Clearly  the  latter  would 
be  more  reasonable;  and  here  in  this  tremendous  stimulus 
we  should  have  the  conditions  of  the  origin  of  religion.  The 
result  is  thus  reached  by  taking  a  rational  theory  of  origin 
and  connecting  with  it  the  function  of  the  genius  in  intro- 
ducing variations,— a  function  with  which  history  and 
psychology  have  made  us  familiar* 

We  have  only  to  combine  our  insight  into  man's  nature, 
given  by  biology  and  psychology,  with  the  theory  of  the 
origin  of  religion  which  seems  best  to  comport  with  reason 
and  history,  in  order  to  reach  the  conditions  of  the  origin 
of  man's  consciousness  of  sin.  If  religion  be  co-existent 
with  reflection,  it  is  older  than  ethics  and,  chronologically, 
the  ethical  consciousness  would  develop  out  of  the  religious 
consciousness.  What  civilized  man  achieves,  then,  by  pass- 
ing reflectively  through  ethics  to  religion  (the  translation  of 
our  duties  into  divine  commands),  the  primitive  man  would 
reach,  in  germ,  in  his  first  experiences  of  law.  The  first 
law  to  him  would  be  the  divine  law  coming  to  him  as  the 
will  of  his  God.  Now,  if  we  can  imagine  a  pre-ethical 
stage  of  religion  (and  most  anthropologists  believe  that 
ethics  and  religion  are  separable),  we  shall  have  a  situa- 
tion in  which  man  develops  what  we  may  call  the  proto- 
type of  a  sense  of  sin,  although  it  is  not  as  yet  the  sense 
of  sin  as  we  understand  it.  We  may  suppose  the  primitive 
man,  under  the  temptation  of  his  sensuous  nature,  disre- 
garding or  disobeying  the  command  of  his  deity.  What 
would  be  the  result?  A  feeling  of  terror  lest  he  have  in- 
curred the  wrath  of  the  offended  deity  and  an  apprehension 
of  impending  punishment  which  he  has  incurred  by  his 
disobedience.  The  two  feelings  coalescing  would  lead  him 
either  to  flee  from  the  presence  of  the  deity  or  to  endeavor 
to  do  something  whereby  the  anger  of  the  deity  might  be 


548  SYNTHESIS.  part  n. 

placated.     The  alternatives  would  then  be  escape  or  pro- 
pitiation. 

We  have  pointed  out  how,  apart  from  and  antecedent 
to  the  origin  of  animism,  the  use  of  the  self-analogy  would 
serve  for  the  characterization  of  the  deity,  and  how,  out 
of  this  early  characterization  of  the  gods  of  the  objective 
religious  consciousness,  an  ethical  element  in  the  charac- 
terization of  the  deity  would  arise  and  a  germinal  con- 
ception of  a  God  of  righteousness.  We  have  here,  then, 
the  conditions  of  the  origin  of  the  sense  of  sin  proper, 
^  — the  sense  of  having  disobeyed  the  law  of  one  who  has  the 
moral  right  to  command.  Before  a  God  of  righteousness 
whom  he  had  disobeyed,  man  would  feel  himself  a  wicked 
sinner,  worthy  of  airy  punishment  the  offended  deity  might 
adjudge  to  be  just.  We  have  advanced  reasons  for  think- 
ing that  polytheism  with  its  animistic  root  did  not  antedate 
forms  of  religion  which,  while  not  in  fact  monotheistic, 
were  yet  unitary  rather  than  pluralistic  in  their  spirit. 
This  stage  of  religion  Max  Miiller  has  characterized  as 
henotheistic.  It  combines  two  features,— (1)  objective 
origin,  the  gods  being  the  personified  object  of  nature,  such 
as  the  sun,  the  sky,  the  lightning  or  the  unknown  cause  of 
these;  (2)  a  unitary  tendency,  manifesting  itself  either 
in  a  method  of  subordination  of  lower  deities  to  a  supreme 
deity,  or,  as  in  the  case  of  the  Hindu  religions,  in  a  process 
of  concentration  by  virtue  of  which  the  divine  attributes 
are  all  accredited  to  various  gods  in  succession.  This 
combination  of  objective  origin  and  unitary  tendency 
formed,  as  we  have  found  reason  to  believe,  the  basis  of  a 
religious  movement  which  never  became  completely  absorbed 
into  polytheism  and  which  tended  to  monotheism  from  the 
beginning.  Now  the  origin  and  one  line  of  the  develop- 
ment, of  the  sense  and  doctrine  of  sin,  would  be  coincident 
with  this  monotheistic  movement,  and,  coming  down 
through  Judaism  and  the  worship  of  Jehovah,  would  form 
one  of  the  antecedents  of  Christianity.  But  we  have  seen 
that    Christianity    had    another    important    antecedent    in 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  EETKIBUTION.  549 

Hellenism  and  that  it  was  mainly  through  contact  with 
Hellenism  that  familiarity  was  obtained  with  the  doctrine 
of  transmigration  and  the  other  modes  in  which  the  doc- 
trine of  retribution  had  embodied  itself.     We  are  not  yet 
speaking  of  retribution,  however,  but  of  the  development 
of  the  idea  and  doctrine  of  sin  in  connection  with  the  re- 
ligious development  of  the  race.     Mr.  Tylor  connects  the 
doctrine  of  retribution  with  the  earlier  belief  in  the  con- 
tinued life  of  the  soul  beyond  death.     This,  however,  would 
scarcely  serve  as  a  clue  for  the  development  of  the  sense  of 
sin.     If  we  confine  our  view  to  the  animistic  religions  which 
are  polytheistic  in  their  spirit  and  form,  we  shall  be  likely  to 
connect  the  development  of  the  idea  or  sense  of  sin  with  the 
non-ethical  form  of  the  feeling  of  demerit  which  springs 
from  the  sense  of  having  incurred  the  vengeance  of  the  deity 
who  is  capable  of  doing  harm  to  the  offender  and  must  needs, 
therefore,  be  placated.     The  feeling  here  would  be  little  else 
than  a  lively  anticipation  of  punishment,  and  would  have 
scarcely  any  trace  of  the  ethical  element  in  it.     This  feeling 
would  be  still  further  developed  by  the  sacrifices  and  gifts 
and  charms  and  incantations  and  other  means  used  to  make 
expiation  and  placate  the  wrath  of  the  offended  deities. 
Then    again,    a   most   important   means    of   the    evolution 
of  this  feeling  would  be  the  taboo,  the  setting  apart  of 
things   as   sacred   or   accursed   and   the   prohibition   from 
touching  anything  thus  tabooed.     The  history  of  the  re- 
ligious customs  of  the  savages  is  rich  in  examples  of  the 
various  manifestations  of  this  non-ethical  sense  of  sin  (if 
we  may  be  allowed  to  call  it  what  it  is  not).     Of  course 
the  feeling  would  vary,  becoming  more  unethical  and  super- 
stitious   as    religion    degenerated,    while    in   those    epochs 
of  religious  reform  in  which  even  polytheism  sometimes 
participated,  there  would  appear  a  dawning  of  the  ethical. 
Among  the  lowest  tribes  of  savages  would  be  found  traces  of 
this   higher   ethical   sense   and   a   feeling  that   sometimes 
approximated  the  idea  of  sin  as  found  in  the  most  advanced 
religions. 


550  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

The  sense  of  sin  is  accompanied  with  the  feeling  of 
guilt }  and  guilt  is  simply  the  negative  side  of  responsibility. 
When  I  am  responsible  I  am  sponsor  for  the  result  and 
must  make  it  good.  So,  when  I  have  the  feeling  of  guilt,  I 
am  conscious  of  being  in  for,  or  good  for,  that  which  means 
punishment  or  evil  of  some  kind.  Ethically,  the  feeling 
of  guilt  involves  desert.  I  not  only  have  not  earned  good, 
but  I  have  positively  earned  that  which  is  evil.  The  feel- 
ing of  being  justly  liable  to  evil  on  account  of  my  conduct 
is  the  ethical  sense  of  guilt.  Now  the  evil  which  guilt 
merits  is  retribution.  Sin  and  retribution  are,  therefore, 
always  close  fellows.  Historically,  the  origin  and  develop- 
ment of  the  belief  in  retribution  is  part  and  parcel  of 
the  whole  history  of  religion.  But  it  is  especially  con- 
nected with  the  development  of  the  idea  of  the  soul. 
Mr.  Tylor  connects  it  especially  with  animism,  which  first 
arrived  at  the  conception  of  a  life  of  the  soul  beyond  the 
death  of  the  body.  Out  of  this  belief  in  soul-survival  grew 
the  developed  conception  of  spirits  which  were  free  from 
any  special  bodily  connections.  Mr.  Tylor  thinks  the  special 
doctrine  of  retribution  a  later  development  of  what  he  calls 
the  continuance-theory  of  the  life  of  the  soul.  The  savage 
ancestor  first  through  dreams  and  ghost-visions  developed 
the  animistic  doctrine  of  souls  or  spirits  which  are  capable 
of  living  apart  from  the  body.  Upon  this  he  built  his 
theory  of  existence  after  death,— the  continued  existence 
of  the  soul.  This  continuance-theory  was  at  first  largely 
non-ethical.  But  in  course  of  time,  as  men's  moral  ideas 
developed,  Mr.  Tylor  finds  that  the  continuance-theory  ex- 
perienced an  ethical  change,  taking  on  the  form  of  a 
retribution-theory  and  becoming  part  of  the  machinery  of 
eschatology.  In  short,  the  doctrines  of  continuity  of  life 
and  of  the  punishment  of  evil  desert,  which  have  had 
distinct  roots,  coalesced  at  an  early  (though  not  the  earliest) 
period  in  the  world's  history  and  a  retribution-theory, 
founded  on  the  idea  of  punishment  in  a  future  life  for  the 
evil   deeds  of  the   present,   came   into   existence.     In   this 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  EETRIBUTION.  551 

connection  Mr.  Tylor  points  out  the  large  part  which  doc- 
trines of  transmigration  and  metempsychosis  have  played 
in  the  ancient  beliefs  about  future  existence.  He  notes 
also  a  very  suggestive  distinction  between  theories  which 
bind  the  soul  to  some  series  of  bodily  conditions  con- 
nected with  the  working  out  of  a  cycle  of  retribution, 
and  others  which  leave  it  free  from  such  fate  and  in 
a  position  to  work  out  its  destiny  in  a  more  direct  and 
personal  manner. 

Now  it  is  true  that  the  doctrine  of  retribution  has  had 
a  history  in  which,  no  doubt,  animism  has  played  a  major 
part  in  the  early  stages.  Mr.  Tylor 's  distinction  between 
the  two  different  ways  of  regarding  the  future  of  the  soul 
has  a  suggestion,  however,  that  seems  to  me  to  be  valuable. 
We  have  already,  in  the  chapters  on  religion,  distinguished 
between  a  first  and,  in  spirit  at  least,  monotheistic  tendency 
in  religion  arising  out  of  the  objective  nature  of  its  origin, 
and  the  mode  by  which  the  deity  would  at  first  be  char- 
acterized. And  we  have  found  reasons  for  thinking  that 
this  earliest  tendency  was  never  completely  merged  in 
animistic-polytheism,  but  maintained  a  kind  of  distinct 
tradition,  continuing  the  monotheistic  and  the  ethical 
tendencies  and  representing  in  a  kind  of  background  a 
higher  and  purer  form  of  religious  belief.  Connecting  this 
with  the  fact  that  theories  of  transmigration  and  metempsy- 
chosis dominated  wherever  polytheism  prevailed,  and  that 
the  more  personal  form  of  retribution  was  found  only  in 
connection  with  the  more  distinctively  monotheistic  re- 
ligions, like  that  of  the  Hebrews,  who,  while  believing  in 
a  future  existence,  put  very  much  less  stress  on  it  than  they 
put  upon  the  present,  I  think  we  shall  be  led  to  conclude 
that  there  is  good  reason  for  associating  this  more  personal 
and  freer  conception  which  Mr.  Tylor  marks,  with  the 
ethico-monotheistic  tendency  in  general,  as  not  only  one  of 
its  accompaniments,  but  also  as  its  special  fruit.  The 
logical  theory  of  animistic-polytheism  would  work  out  in 
the  transmigration-series,  and  when  the  idea  of  retribution 


552  SYNTHESIS.  part  II. 

arose,  it  would  be  logical  for  polytheism  to  employ  the 
transmigration-series  as  its  most  effective  instrument.  But 
the  monotheistic  tendency,  not  being  friendly  to  this  mode 
of  thinking,  and  responding  to  the  more  direct  ethical 
motives  of  personality,  would  place  more  emphasis  on  the 
direct  relation  of  the  soul  to  God  and  much  less  on  its  con- 
nection with  its  materialistic  conditions.  The  result  would 
be,  therefore,  (1)  a  more  spiritual  conception  of  the  life 
of  the  soul,  and  (2)  a  tendency  to  put  the  major  emphasis, 
not  on  the  future  life,  but  on  the  soul's  present  relation  to 
God. 

Let  us  suppose,  then,  that  theories  of  retribution  worked 
themselves  out  along  these  lines.  We  should  have  reason  to 
suppose  that  animistic-polytheism  would  identify  itself  more 
closely  with  theories  of  transmigration  and  metempsychosis, 
that  it  would  put  the  major  stress  of  existence  on  the  post- 
or  pre-existence  rather  than  on  the  present  life,  and  that  it 
would  use  the  theory  of  transmigration  as  the  most  effective 
instrument  of  retribution.  We  should  have  reason,  on  the 
other  hand,  to  suppose  that  an  ethical  monotheism  to  which 
animistic  conceptions  were  not  so  germane,  would  rather 
hold  aloof  from  theories  of  transmigration  and  conceive  the 
post-existence  of  the  soul  in  a  more  individual  and  spiritual 
manner,  while  putting  the  major  emphasis  at  all  times  on 
the  present  life  and  its  moral  relation  to  God.  If  this  be 
true,  we  can  understand  the  reticence  of  the  Hebrew 
scriptures,  for  example,  on  the  whole  subject  of  the  future 
life,  a  reticence  which  some  have  mistaken  for  disbelief,  but 
which  is  more  consistent  with  the  co-existence  of  the  belief 
with  the  conviction  that  the  vital  issues  of  the  moral  and 
religious  life  are  to  be  worked  out  in  the  present. 

We  may  be  thankful  for  this  insight,  and  yet  none 
the  less  so  for  those  ultra-Judaic  roots  of  Christianity 
which  brought  it  into  living  relation  with  the  traditions  of 
a  religious  doctrine  that  had  put  the  major-emphasis  on 
pre-  and  post-existence  and  had  on  that  basis  worked  out 
its  solution  of  the  problem  of  human  destiny.     For  the 


chap.  ix.  SIN  AND  EETEIBUTION.  -  553 

flowing  together  of  the  two  traditions  created  a  soil  that 
was  favorable  to  the  reception  and  propagation  of  a  central 
doctrine  of  the  founder  of  Christianity;  namely,  that  all 
life  is  one  and  thai  the  future  is  but  the  continuation  of  the 
present  and  only  more  real  in  the  sense  that  it  supplies 
more  perfect  conditions  for  the  realization  of  the  true  ideal 
of  all  life.  Equal  emphasis  is  thus  put  on  present  and 
future.  Life  is  all  of  one  piece,  because  it  is  the  eternal 
life  from  the  beginning.  For  this  reason  the  Christ  is  said 
to  have  brought  life  and  immortality  to  light. 

The  tendency  of  the  higher  religions  is  to  individualize 
both  sin  and  retribution,  making  them  a  more  personal 
matter  between  man  and  his  own  soul  or  between  the  soul 
and  God.  The  modern  disbelief  in  theories  of  transmi- 
gration and  metempsychosis  rests  on  a  sound  ethical  in- 
stinct. Just  as  the  modern  spirit  reacts  in  favor  of  a  more 
spiritual  conception  of  religion,  so  it  reacts  just  as  strongly 
and  just  as  effectively  in  favor  of  a  more  personal  and  less 
fatalistic  conception  of  human  destiny.  This  reaction  has 
profoundly  affected  the  whole  conception  of  religion,  and 
with  it  the  conceptions  of  sin  and  retribution.  Religion 
has  become  less  an  affair  of  ritual  and  public  observance 
and  more  a  personal  matter  between  the  soul  and  God. 
If  men  are  now  more  reticent  where  religion  is  concerned 
than  former  generations  were,  it  is  partly  at  least  because 
they  feel  more,  instead  of  less,  the  personal  pressure  of 
God's  presence  in  their  lives.  So  in  regard  to  sin  and 
retribution.  If  men  feel  the  "exceeding  sinfulness  of  sin" 
less  than  formerly,  it  is  no  doubt  due  in  part  to  a  more 
adequate  realization  of  the  personal  nature  of  sin.  We 
have  seen  that  sin  is  both  congenital  and  functional.  It 
affects  the  whole  man  and  the  whole  man  feels  that  he  falls 
short  of  the  glory  of  God.  But  the  reflex  of  this,— the 
awful  sense  of  guilt  and  impending  retribution  which  is 
inseparable  from  the  sense  of  sin  itself,— will  depend  di- 
rectly on  our  conceptions  of  God  and  his  attitude  toward 
us  men.     Christianity,  in  making  the  divine  fatherhood  cen- 


\ 


554  SYNTHESIS.  part  ii. 

tral,  and  in  putting  the  major  accent  on  love  as  the  supreme 
attribute  of  this  fatherhood,  and  in  symbolizing  on  the 
cross  infinite  compassion  and  forgivingness,  has  been  itself 
the  great  instrument  in  bringing  about  a  change  in  men's 
conception  of  God  and  his  relation  to  them.  If  this  tends 
to  dispel  to  some  extent  the  fearful  looking  for  of  judg- 
ment, which  characterized  not  only  the  ancient  savages,  but 
also  the  more  modern  Hebrews,  we  ought  not  to  mistake  it 
for  a  decline  of  religion,  or  even  for  an  eclipse  of  the  sense 
of  sin.  The  whole  effect  of  the  Christian  representation 
of  God  has  been  the  elevation  and  spiritualization  of  his 
character  in  men's  conceptions.  He  has  become  a  more 
attractive  and  hence  a  less  terror-inspiring  being,  and  the 
modern  soul  that  is  truly  religious  has  the  impulse  when 
it  has  sinned,  not  to  flee  from  God,  but  rather  to  cast  itself 
upon  his  mercy,  feeling,  with  better  reason  than  the  old 
psalmist  could  have,  that  it  would  rather  fall  into  the 
hands  of  a  loving  God  than  into  those  of  the  most  merciful 
and  just  of  men. 

The  sense  of  sin  will  always  survive  where  the  divine 
ideal  is  high  and  pure  and  where  the  feeling  of  personal  re- 
lation is  strong.  For  just  in  proportion  as  this  is  true  will 
the  soul  realize  its  own  worthlessness  before  God,  and  all  the 
trumpery  righteousness  that  it  can  summon  up  out  of  its  own 
resources  will  seem  as  filthy  rags.  The  idea  of  retribution 
will  experience  a  corresponding  modification.  Just  in  pro- 
portion as  the  element  of  terror  drops  out  of  the  sense  of  sin, 
and  the  soul  loses  the  oppressive  load  of  apprehension  in  the 
divine  presence  because  it  has  learned  to  know  its  heavenly 
father  better,  so  the  whole  conception  of  retribution  will 
be  modified.  It  will  not  consist  so  much  in  a  fearful  look- 
ing for  of  judgment  and  of  fiery  indignation,  as  in  the 
apprehension  of  the  loss  of  the  divine  presence  and  favor 
out  of  life  and  the  consequent  loss  of  the  soul,  that  is, 
the  higher  and  better  self.  The  great  retribution  is  this 
spiritual  loss  itself  with  all  that  it  implies;  a  perdition  so 
deep  that  all  the  symbols  of  punishment  which  the  imagina- 
tion can  invent  are  unable  to  sound  its  depths. 


PART  III 

DEDUCTIONS 


CHAPTER  I. 

PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPEEIENCE. 

In  the  division  of  this  work  just  completed  we  have  made 
an  effort  to  show  how  the  methods  and  concepts  of  science 
and  metaphysics  must  supplement  one  another  in  order  to 
develop  an  ideal  of  complete  knowledge.  We  have  seen  also 
how  knowledge  everywhere  develops  in  connection  with  the 
interests  and  demands  of  the  practical  life  and  how  knowl- 
edge is  in  general  a  means  and  a  necessary  mediator  in  the 
satisfaction  of  these  demands.  We  do  not  mean  by  this  to 
favor  the  utilitarian  idea  of  knowledge  as  merely  an  instru- 
ment of  the  practical,  for  we  believe  that  knowledge  has 
an  intrinsic  value  and  that  it  is  worth  while  to  know 
irrespective  of  the  practical  use  we  make  of  our  knowledge. 
At  the  same  time  it  is  a  healthy  thing  for  the  purveyor  of 
knowledge  to  feel  that  his  results  are  in  general  to  be 
weighed  in  the  scales  of  practical  values  and  that  they  are 
likely  to  be  discounted  if  they  fail  to  bear  this  test. 

Now  it  is  just  here  in  its  practical  relation  to  human 
experience  and  welfare  that  science  has  felt  itself  parti- 
cularly strong  and  metaphysics  has  been  supposed  to  be 
specially  weak.  Reserving  the  consideration  of  metaphysics 
for  the  present,  however,  let  us  here  note  some  of  the  vital 
points  of  connection,  both  theoretical  and  practical,  between 
science  and  experience.  We  employ  the  term  science  here 
in  its  distinction  from  metaphysics  and  in  a  sense  to  which 
the  adjective  natural  may  be  applied ;  and  we  have  seen 

557 


558  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

how  natural  science  and  metaphysics  divide  between  them 
the  whole  field  of  knowledge.  Now,  there  is  a  sense  in 
which  science  involves  a  departure  from  experience.  Science 
is  not  concrete  but  abstract,  and  its  first  effect  is  to  break 
up  the  concretes  it  finds  in  nature.  And  having  reduced 
these  to  abstract  elements  its  further  aim  is  to  formulate 
the  behavior  of  these  elements  into  laws  which  are  also 
abstractions.  It  is  open  to  the  plain  man  to  have  some 
doubt  about  science,  and  he  may  ask  what  use  can  be  made 
in  a  concrete  world  of  laws  that  are  to  such  a  degree 
abstractions.  Let  the  plain  man  study  the  situation,  how- 
ever, and  he  will  make  the  discovery  that  the  abstractions 
of  science  are  not  so  far  removed  from  the  pulse  of  reality 
as  he  thinks.  The  central  fact  about  science  is  that  it  is 
concerned  from  first  to  last  about  one  thing  and  that  is 
what  we  call  physical  agency.  It  is  through  this  concern 
that  it  vitally  relates  itself  to  experience,  since  man  as  a 
physical  being  is  part  of  a  physical  world,  subject  to  its 
laws  and  the  bearer  of  needs  and  interests  which  only  the 
physical  can  satisfy.  Science  relates  itself  to  man  through 
his  relation  to  the  physical  world,  and  this  is  close  and  vital. 
Moreover,  the  law  of  the  physical  world  (I  mean  the 
law  of  its  agency)  is  natural  causation.  Now,  science,  as 
we  have  seen,  is  concerned  about  nothing  else,  from  begin- 
ning to  end,  than  natural  causation.  Its  laws  all  sum  up 
aspects  of  this  kind  of  agency,  and  they  all  become  con- 
crete when  reduced  to  terms  of  causal  agency.  If  now 
we  take  the  standpoint  of  science  and  regard  the  world 
from  the  point  of  view  of  an  observer,— say  one  standing 
on  another  planet,— we  shall  begin  to  realize  how  over- 
whelmingly important  the  physical  is  in  comparison  with 
what  we  call  the  mental,  and  how  wide  the  sweep  of  natural 
causation  is  compared  with  what  man  calls  his  own  self- 
determination.  No  marvel  is  it  then  that  nature  swells  in 
the  scientific  imagination  to  such  proportions  that  it 
threatens  to  swallow  up  man  and  his  consciousness,  leaving 
not  even  a  trace  behind.     The  standpoint  of  science  is  one 


chap.  I.  IMULOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE.  559 

that  subordinates  mind  to  matter  and  consequently  man  to 
nature.  From  its  point  of  view  and  its  way  of  estimating 
values,  physics  will  always  be  the  queen  science,  while 
anthropology  will  tend  to  hide  its  diminished  head  under 
the  mantle  of  physical  analogies.  Again,  if  we  take  into 
consideration  the  relation  of  science  to  the  physical  life  of 
man,  its  utility  is  so  clear  as  to  preclude  all  debate.  In 
fact,  the  physical  life  is  rapidly  becoming  a  problem  for 
the  engineer.  Only  the  engineer  seems  to  have  direct  hold 
on  the  resources  of  life  while  all  others  fall  into  a  sec- 
ondary relation.  From  the  standpoint  of  the  modus 
vivendi,  then,  it  seems  to  be  science,  and  science  alone,  that 
gets  into  close  and  vital  relations  with  the  physical  life  of 
man.  But  science  goes  deeper  than  the  mere  catering  to 
physical  wants.  Man  is  a  being  who  wishes  to  know,  and 
this  desire  creates  more  refined  needs  which  his  investigation 
must  satisfy.  Science  meets  the  desire  for  knowledge  from 
one  whole  point  of  view.  Taking  the  world  as  a  system  of 
physical  forces  operating  under  the  law  of  natural  causa- 
tion, we  naturally  seek  to  reduce  the  infinite  plurality 
of  the  world's  phenomena  to  a  few  generalized  points  of 
view.  Even  then  we  are  not  satisfied,  but  seek  further  to 
reduce  these  generalizations  to  laws  of  physical  agency. 
It  is  only  when  we  have  connected  phenomena,  through 
causation,  with  their  grounds,  that  we  feel  we  have  reached 
anything  like  an  explanation.  Even  then  we  are  not 
satisfied,  but  go  on  with  our  investigation  until  on  the 
one  hand  we  have  carried  the  physical  elements  back  to  the 
point  of  their  utmost  refinement,  while,  on  the  other,  we 
proceed  until  we  have  reached  a  notion  of  unity  which 
will  enable  us  to  reduce  the  world  to  one.  Science 
is  always  seeking  some  Newtonian  generalization  in  space 
or  time  or  energy,  which  in  the  scope  of  its  application 
will  reduce  the  physical  world  to  unity. 

We  have  seen  how  wide  the  scope  of  science  is  in  its 
own  field,  and  what  we  have  to  add  here  is  a  plea  for  its 
necessity  as  an  element  in  a  philosophical  doctrine  of  the 


560  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

world.  Philosophy  has  been  denned  as  the  idea  of  syn- 
thetic knowledge,  and  we  have  taken  pains  to  show  how 
science  and  metaphysics  supply  the  terms  of  the  synthesis. 
Now,  the  special  point  we  wish  to  urge  here  is  that  science 
in  some  very  important  respects  holds  the  primacy  in  this 
synthesis.  It  is  difficult  to  see  how  without  science  there 
could  be  any  rational  metaphysics.  Not  only  has  it  been 
the  case  that  the  great  philosophers  of  the  world  have  been 
vitally  alive  to  science  (and  we  have  only  to  name  Plato, 
Aristotle,  Bacon,  Descartes,  Leibnitz  and  Kant  in  this  con- 
nection), but  such  an  investigation  as  we  have  carried  out 
in  the  second  division  of  this  ivork  is  sufficient  to  bring 
out  the  fact  that  it  is  only  in  connection  with  scientific 
conceptions  that  a  clear  idea  of  the  vital  problems  of  meta- 
physics can  be  obtained.  And  it  is  not  going  to  extremes, 
I  think,  to  say  that  the  points  of  correlation  between  science 
and  metaphysics  can  be  discovered  only  in  the  double  light 
of  both  disciplines.  Moreover,  the  method  of  science  must 
be  clearly  conceived  before  any  definition  of  metaphysical 
method  is  possible. 

Our  special  plea  here  is,  however,  that  experience  itself 
includes  science  as  one  of  its  instruments  and  as  a  necessary 
means  of  attaining  its  own  ends.  AATe  have  seen  how  this 
becomes  obvious  on  the  practical  side.  Man  cannot  go  far 
in  the  satisfaction  of  his  physical  wants  without  the  aid  of 
science.  Nor  can  he  even  make  a  start  in  the  satisfaction 
of  his  desire  for  knowledge,  without  science.  There  is  a 
kind  of  popular  knowledge  that  is  not  science,  and  this  has 
its  own  value  as  the  plain  man's  case  goes  to  show,  but  this 
species  soon  reaches  its  limit,  and,  as  a  whole,  it  is  found 
to  be  unreliable  except  for  the  roughest  kind  of  approxi- 
mation. There  is,  then,  a  threatened  breakdown  of  the 
whole  business  of  experience  which  is  only  averted  by  the 
rise  of  science  and  its  exact  methods.  Whatever  may  have 
been  true  of  the  ancients,  it  is  certainly  the  case  that  mod- 
ern life  would  have  been  impossible  without  the  aid  of 
science.     This  help  has  not  been  merely  practical.     Modern 


CHAP.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPEEIENCE.  561 

science  has  given  us  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth.  It  has 
enlarged  our  conceptions,  revolutionized  our  methods  and 
immeasurably  extended  the  scope  of  our  ideas  of  reality. 
It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  the  world  in  which  we 
moderns  live,  if  it  had  been  dreamed  by  an  ancient,  would 
have  been  regarded  as  too  extravagant  for  even  the  kind  of 
credence  that  was  then  attached  to  dreams. 

The  truth  is,  when  we  begin  to  apprehend  the  vast 
function  modern  science  has  performed  in  the  drama  of 
modern  experience  the  danger  is,  not  that  science  will  not 
obtain  due  recognition,  but  that  it  will  claim  a  monopoly. 
This  tendency  can  be  redressed  only  by  combining  with  a 
generous  recognition  of  the  place  which  science  holds  in  the 
philosophical  synthesis,  an  insight  into  the  fact  that  there 
is  another  point  of  view  from  which  consciousness  becomes 
primate  and  leads  to  the  concepts  and  methods  of  another 
discipline.  The  philosophical  synthesis  begins  with  science 
but  it  reaches  its  conclusion  in  metaphysics. 

The  metaphysical  conceptions  which  we  have  developed 
in  connection  with  the  preceding  parts  of  our  work  are 
such  only  as  have  been  able  to  vindicate  their  vital  relations 
with  the  processes  of  science  and  general  experience.  Now 
it  has  become  fashionable  in  some  quarters  to  preach  a  kind 
of  divorce  between  what  is  called  Reason,  with  a  capital  R, 
and  experience,  and  to  represent  reason  as  in  a  position  to 
lay  down  the  law  to  experience.  But  such  a  divorce  and 
such  an  attitude  are  possible  only  when  a  different  concept 
of  experience  is  held  from  the  one  adopted  here.  To  us, 
reason  is  simply  the  voice  of  experience  when  it  speaks,  not 
fragmentarily,  but  in  its  unity.  The  doctrine  that  is  here 
professed  is  one  that  regards  experience  as  the  medium  in 
which  the  conscious  self  realizes  itself  and  its  world.  In- 
evitably, then,  it  will  find  all  its  possessions  in  experience, 
and  to  this  court  its  appeal  must  always,  in  the  last  resort, 
be  made.  That  the  appeal  to  experience,  if  no  mere  lip- 
service,  will  be  revolutionary  in  many  ways  is  only  to  be 
expected.  In  the  first  place,  it  will  certainly  strike  a  blow 
36 


562  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

at  the  heart  of  rationalism ;  for  the  inner  citadel  of  ration- 
alism is  the  claim  that  reason  is  vested  with  some  inde- 
pendent, ultra-experiential  authority  by  virtue  of  which 
it  can  put  forth  dicta  that  have  the  right  of  way  over  fact 
and  may  override  the  verdicts  of  experience.  If  this  claim 
be  successfully  denied  then  the  backbone  of  rationalism  is 
broken.  Now  the  only  way,  we  are  convinced,  in  which 
this  end  can  be  really  secured  is  not  by  any  sort  of  logical 
refutation,  but  rather  by  the  laborious  working  out  of  a 
doctrine  of  experience  in  which  the  fact  that  reason  is 
simply  the  voice  of  experience  in  its  wholeness  shall  be 
exhibited  in  detail.  This  exhibition  has  been  attempted  in 
Foundations  of  Knowledge  and  in  the  present  treatise; 
with  what  success,  it  is  the  business  of  others  to  determine. 
The  aim  of  this  chapter  is  not  a  further  vindication  of 
the  general  doctrine  of  experience,  but  rather  an  exhibition 
of  some  of  its  most  vital  bearings  on  the  problems  of  reality. 
In  metaphysical  reflection  everything  seems  to  depend,  in 
the  last  analysis,  on  the  mental  attitude  of  the  thinker. 
It  has  been  a  reproach  of  the  metaphysics  of  the  past,  not 
altogether  deserved,  that  it  has  been  evolved  too  exclusively 
out  of  the  inner  consciousness  of  the  individual  thinker, 
and  that  it  partakes  too  much,  therefore,  of  the  character 
of  subjective  speculation.  It  may  be  admitted  that  a  char- 
acteristic weakness  is  here  brought  to  light.  The  tempta- 
tion to  subjectivity  may  be  regarded  as  one  fruitful  source 
of  metaphysical  fallacies.  How,  then,  is  this  weakness  to 
be  overcome?  We  answer,  by  an  attitude  of  thinking 
which  refuses  to  regard  reason,  as  it  has  formed  itself  in 
your  thinking  or  in  mine,  as  all-sufficient,  and  which  recog- 
nizes with  Socrates  the  amenability  of  individual  judgments 
and  opinions  to  the  court  of  the  social  consciousness.  By 
this  I  do  not  mean  any  superficial  appeal  to  public  opinion ; 
but  rather,  an  appeal  to  that  common  consciousness  in  which 
individual  judgments  survive,  if  at  all,  in  a  generalized 
and    purified    form.      Such    judgments    were    sought    by 


chap.  i.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE.  563 

Socrates  as  the  data  of  reliable  science  and  philosophy,  and 
his  method  is  full  of  suggestiveness  for  the  present  day.  It 
was  not  Socrates  but  the  sophists  who  attempted  to  formu- 
late the  judgments  of  the  social  consciousness  by  simply 
developing  an  organon  of  public  opinion.  Socrates  had 
the  psychological  insight  which  led  him  to  see  that  true 
judgments  could  not  be  picked  up  in  this  factitious  way, 
but  must  be  developed  by  a  critical  exercise  of  the  equating 
function  of  the  social  consciousness.  This  is  what  the 
Socratic  dialectic  meant  as  a  method,— the  critical  exer- 
cise of  the  socially  equating  consciousness  in  order  to 
overcome  the  subjectivity  and  local  coloring  of  the  in- 
dividual judgment,  and  thus  to  translate  it  into  a  form 
of  general  validity.  The  need  of  this  equating  func- 
tion as  a  means  of  objectifying  and  generalizing  the 
processes  of  individual  thinking  is  just  as  pressing  now 
and  at  all  times  as  in  the  time  of  Socrates.  It  is  simply 
one  form  of  the  appeal  to  experience  which  the  individ- 
ual thinker  must  constantly  make.  Or,  to  put  the  case 
from  a  somewhat  different  angle,  experience  must  be 
allowed  to  determine  the  thought  of  the  individual 
thinker  by  shaping  his  thinking  into  an  organ  of  a  general 
objective  consciousness  and  thus  enabling  him  to  pronounce 
socially  equated  judgments.  Let  us  call  these  judgments 
the  precipitate  which  results  when  the  individual  and  the 
social  consciousness  have,  as  it  were,  chemically  combined. 
This  will  indicate  the  method  by  which  individual  judg- 
ments may  acquire  objective  and  general  authority.  Now, 
the  most  perfect  illustration  which  we  have  of  the  forma- 
tion of  such  judgments  is  supplied  by  the  sciences.  It  is 
coming  to  be  recognized  that  science  is  not  in  any  real 
sense  a  merely  individual  function  and  that  the  most 
essential  aim  of  a  true  scientific  method  is  to  induct  the 
individual  consciousness  into  the  objective  general  mold  so 
that  it  will  be  able  to  speak  from  the  outset  as  the  organ  of 
the  general  consciousness  and  not  simply  its  own  con  vie- 


564  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in, 

tion.1  When  it  is  borne  in  mind  that  results  thus  attained 
are  subjected  to  further  purification  by  requiring  for  them 
a  consensus  of  a  plurality  of  scientifically  formed  judg- 
ments, it  will  be  seen  how  thorough  the  application  of  this 
kind  of  experience-test  is  in  the  field  of  science.  And  what 
is  here  contended  for  is  the  necessity  for  the  use  of  the  same 
type  of  experience-test  in  the  sphere  of  the  metaphysical 
judgment.  In  the  nature  of  the  case,  the  rigid  form  of 
science  will  be  found  inapplicable  here,  but  the  principle 
must  be  rightly  applied  and  the  metaphysical  thinker  must 
make  a  constant  appeal  to  experience  in  this  form,  recog- 
nizing the  fact  that  his  thought,  in  order  to  be  generally 
true,  must  be  promulgated  from  a  pou  sto  that  is  general. 

We  have  taken  the  ground  that  there  can  be  no  ration- 
ality apart  from  experience  and  that  what  we  call  the  voice 
of  reason  is  only  the  voice  of  experience  as  a  whole.  This 
doctrine  we  wish  to  exemplify  somewhat  more  fully  at  this 
point.  If  one  asks  what  we  mean  by  the  rational,  we 
shall  be  able  to  find  no  better  answer  than  this,  that  it 
is  the  congruous.  What  is  reasonable  is  congruous.  But 
congruity  implies  some  standard  or  ideal  in  relation  to 
which  the  supposed  fact  is  congruous,  that  is,  with 
which  it  harmonizes.  Where  shall  this  standard  be  found  ? 
This  is  a  crucial  question  in  metaphysics.  It  is  easy,  of 
course,  to  say  that  the  standard  must  be  found  in  experience, 
as  we  have  already  said,  but  how  is  it  to  be  found  there  and 
how  are  we  to  avoid  mere  relativity,  if  we  erect  experience 
into  a  standard  of  rationality  ?  This  question  has  not  been 
altogether  neglected  in  the  preceding  discussions,  and  what 
is  said  here  will  be  more  or  less  of  a  summary  of  what  has 

1  The  tendency  to  emphasize  the  importance  of  the  social  con- 
sciousness and  the  social  tests  of  truth  is  well  exemplified  in  the 
works  of  Ward  and  Stout  in  Great  Britain  and  those  of  Royce  and 
Baldwin  on  this  side  of  the  water.  Ward's  "general  experience" 
on  which  he  puts  so  much  stress  is  a  function  of  the  social  con- 
sciousness. 


chap.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE  565 

been  more  elaborately  put  before.  There  are  at  least  three 
points  that  need  to  be  emphasized  in  a  doctrine  that 
grounds  rationality  in  experience.  In  the  first  place,  we 
must  set  out  with  an  adequate  notion  of  what  constitutes 
individual  experience.  If  we  realize  the  complexity  of  the 
elements  of  experience  and  the  fact  that  in  its  processes  the 
intellectual  is  inseparable  from  the  emotional  and  volitional, 
we  shall  be  prepared  to  admit  that  the  rational  cannot  be 
any  mere  abstract  idea  of  the  logical  intellect,  but  that  it 
must  be  the  voice  of  the  intellect  informed  and  motived 
by  feeling  and  will;  that  it  will,  therefore,  voice  the  whole 
concrete  life  and  activity  of  man.  The  voice  of  reason 
will  be  the  unison  of  the  whole  experience-complex  and 
the  demand  it  utters  will  be  one  that  includes  volitional 
as  well  as  emotional  and  intellectual  elements.  It  is 
true  that  we  distinguish  reason  from  feeling  and  will, 
but  this  only  means,  when  we  know  what  we  are  saying, 
that  the  reason-complex  is  different  from  the  complexes 
which  we  call  feeling  and  will.  The  reason-complex  is  a 
psychosis  in  which  thought-activity  is  motived  innerly  by 
feeling-interest  and  will,  whereas  what  we  call,  by  way  of 
distinction,  feeling  and  will,  are  simply  complex  psychoses 
in  which  feeling  and  will  are  informed  with  thought.  An 
intellectual  process  is  one  in  which  thought  dominates  and 
determines  the  form,  but  not  necessarily  one  that  is  pure  ab- 
stract thinking- activity.  Now,  characterizing  the  activity 
of  consciousness  in  its  concreteness  as  experience,  it  follows 
that  reason  will  be  this  concrete  experience  uttering  itself  in 
the  form  of  thought,  and  what  we  call  rationality,  or  the 
criterion  of  rationality,  will  be  the  requirement  of  this 
thought-complex,  that  candidates  for  admission  into  its 
fold  shall  harmonize  with  experience  as  it  expresses  itself 
in  this  thought-unity. 

This,  however,  is  not  the  whole  secret  of  rationality.  It 
simply  supplies  the  form  which  subsequent  experience  is  to 
apply  and  develop.  For,  in  the  second  place,  the  judgment  of 
rationality  must  be  further  determined  by  passing  through 


566  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

the  generalizing  medium  of  the  social  consciousness.  This 
will  be  necessary  in  order  to  free  it  from  localisms  and  stamp 
it  with  true  objective  character.  The  principal  moments  in 
this  process  may  be  stated  as  follows.  We  have  seen  that  the 
social  consciousness  develops  in  man  in  the  form  of  selfhood 
writ  large.  Man  as  a  bearer  of  the  social  consciousness  is  an 
organ  of  the  social  intellect,  feeling,  will,  and  his  responses 
are  to  the  requirements  of  a  social  self  which  is  the  bearer 
and  subject  of  social  relations  and  reactions.  This  social  self 
will  therefore  relate  itself  to  the  private  individual  self  as 
a  larger  objective  self  in  which  the  narrower  self  is  included 
and  in  which  it  finds  itself,  therefore,  expanded  and  gen- 
eralized. Inasmuch,  then,  as  the  spring  of  rationality  is 
the  voice  of  selfhood  uttering  the  demand  of  experience  as 
a  whole,  the  voice  of  this  larger,  objective,  social  selfhood 
will  become,  when  this  translation  of  the  private  individual 
consciousness  into  the  form  of  the  general  social  conscious- 
ness takes  place,  the  organ  of  a  higher  rationality  which 
the  individual  will  assent  to  as  to  the  voice  of  its  higher 
and  more  objective  self.  We  see  thus  how  experience 
determines  the  standard  of  rationality  in  this  higher  form. 
But  we  have  seen  that  the  process  of  experience  does  not 
end  with  the  generalized  activities  of  the  social  conscious- 
ness. It  goes  on  into  the  sphere  of  religion  and  to  the 
apprehension  of  the  consciousness  of  the  eternal.  And 
since  it  recognizes  this  consciousness  from  the  outset  as  the 
activity  of  a  being  which  transcends  it  in  the  attributes  of 
infiniteness  and  absoluteness,  its  relation  to  this  conscious- 
ness cannot  be  in  all  respects  identical  with  its  relation  to 
the  generalized  social  consciousness.  The  social  is  a  gen- 
eralization of  the  consciousness  of  just  such  beings  as  our- 
selves, and  there  can  be  no  real  social  individual  apart 
from  you  and  me  and  other  individual  selves.  The  social 
is  simply  an  extension  of  the  finite  consciousness  into  which 
we  enter  as  our  very  own.  Our  relation  to  the  eternal  con- 
sciousness is  not  in  all  respects  the  same  as  this.  There  is 
the  fundamental  difference,  to  start  Avith,  that  the  eternal 


chap.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE.  567 

consciousness  is  in  its  immediacy  the  organ  of  an  infinite 
and  absolute  being  whose  activities  ground  and  compre- 
hend the  world.  But  there  is  a  true  sense  in  which  we 
finite  individuals  enter  into  and  realize  that  eternal  con- 
sciousness. "We  are  not  considering  here  the  dialectic  by 
means  of  which  we  achieve  an  approximating  conception 
of  the  absolute,  or  the  mode  by  which  we  come  into  intelli- 
gible relations  with  the  being  which  transcends  us.  Taking 
all  this  for  granted,  we  are  concerned  here  to  show  that  the 
only  way  in  which  a  finite  being  like  ourselves  can  come 
into  real  relations  with  the  infinite  is  by  becoming  in  a  true 
sense  the  bearer  of  an  infinite  or  eternal  consciousness,  and 
this  is  achieved,  as  Plato  and  all  the  religious  thinkers,  and 
Kant  and  all  the  ethical  thinkers,  have  shown,  in  those 
higher  realms  of  experience  in  which  we  find  ourselves 
responding  to  motives  and  going  out  in  activities  the  scope 
of  which  transcends  any  and  every  conceivable  time-span, 
—the  pressure  of  duty;  the  pressure  of  the  ideals  of  the 
religious  life;  the  responses  which  spring  from  the  higher 
sense  of  the  beautiful.  In  these  experiences  we  penetrate 
into  the  realm  of  the  eternal.  This,  however,  is  easily  said 
but  hard  perhaps  to  make  intelligible.  Let  us  approach 
it  from  a  somewhat  different  angle.  We  know  that  a  man 
has  the  power  not  only  to  realize  his  experience  successively 
in  the  links  of  a  time-series,  but  also  to  integrate  its 
moments,  past,  present  and  future,  into  one  all-compre- 
hending moment,  and  not  only  to  contemplate  it  as  a  whole, 
but  to  function  from  the  standpoint  of  that  unitary  con- 
sciousness. This,  I  apprehend,  is  the  real  standpoint  of 
those  higher  experiences  spoken  of  above.  Now  a  con- 
sciousness that  thus  reclaims  itself  from  the  clutches  of  the 
time-series  and  acts  as  the  organ  of  an  integrated  whole  of 
experience,  is,  in  its  form,  essentially  eternal.1     And  such 

1  Royce  develops  substantially  this  conception  of  the  eternal  in 
the  third  lecture  of  the  Second  Series  of  Gifford  Lectures  on  The 
World  and  the  Individual.  This  is  one  of  the  most  suggestive 
lectures   in  the  series. 


568  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

a  consciousness,  while  it  does  not  lift  us  to  the  divine  plane 
or  make  us  the  equals  of  God,  yet  supplies  a  divining  rod, 
as  it  were,  which  enables  us  to  determine  in  conception  the 
interval  between  us  and  God  and  to  conceive  how  the  infini- 
tation  of  our  ideals  may  translate  them  into  forms  of  the 
divine  experience.  For  just  as  it  is  possible  for  us  to  con- 
ceive our  self-experience  as  realizing  progressively  larger  and 
larger  wholes,  and  just  as  we  realize  that  each  larger  whole 
supplies  the  standard  of  rationality  to  that  which  is  lower 
than  itself,  so  the  very  inner  trend  of  our  experience  leads 
us  necessarily  to  the  ideal  of  an  eternal  all-including  expe- 
rience,—the  experience  of  the  absolute,  in  which  the  stand- 
ard of  rationality  is  completed  and  grounded.  This  is 
the  last  stage  in  the  development  of  the  criterion  of  ration- 
ality. The  requirement  of  reason,  in  the  last  analysis,  is 
the  voice  of  a  divinely  complete  experience  requiring  that 
all  lower  standards  shall  be  in  harmony  with  itself.  When 
we  say,  then,  that  reason  is  the  voice  of  experience  uttering 
itself  as  a  whole,  we  mean,  in  the  last  analysis,  that  the 
final  and  ultimate  standard  of  rationality  is  to  be  found  in 
the  idea  of  an  experience  that  is  all-complete  and  divine. 

We  have  sufficiently  indicated  what  we  mean  in  general 
by  regarding  metaphysics  as  an  organ  of  experience.  This 
involves,  however,  the  doctrine  that  experience  as  an  all- 
inclusive  term  holds  within  it  the  distinction  between  the 
finite  and  the  infinite,— the  relative  and  the  absolute.  This 
we  have  frankly  maintained  all  along.  It  may  be  well, 
however,  at  this  point  to  reargue  the  question,  in  some  of 
its  most  vital  bearings  at  least.  In  a  chapter  in  Founda- 
tions of  Knowledge,  on  The  Absolute  as  Experience,  I  have 
endeavored  to  show  in  some  detail  how  the  absolute,  if  it 
is  to  be  intelligently  affirmed  at  all,  must  be  conceived  in 
terms  of  an  experience  transcending  our  own  but  involving 
the  same  fundamental  constitution  and  modes  of  activity. 
The  only  alternative  to  this  is  agnosticism  which  regards 
the  absolute  as  a  purely  transcendent  and  unthinkable 
term.     On  this  basis  the  agnostic  either  denies  the  reality 


chap.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPEEIENCE.  569 

of  any  absolute,  or  else,  affirming  it,  maintains  with  Herbert 
Spencer  that  our  finite  experience  supplies  no  categories 
under  which  it  can  be  in  any  sense  defined.  Now  the 
existence  of  an  absolute  is  a  question  we  do  not  argue 
here.  The  grounds  on  which  we  assert  necessity  in  the 
world  have  already  been  developed.  Here  the  question 
is:  Suppose  that  we  have  grounds  for  asserting  the 
existence  of  an  absolute  in  the  world,  have  we  any  re- 
sources in  our  experience  that  will  enable  us  to  render 
this  absolute  in  any  sense  intelligible?  This  is  the  ques- 
tion which  the  agnostic  of  Mr.  Spencer's  school  meets  with 
denial.  We  challenge  the  agnostic,  however,  to  make  clear 
how  any  purely  transcendent  term  can  ever  be  shown  to  be 
necessary.  If  the  absolute  be  necessary  for  the  grounding 
of  the  world  or  for  the  completion  of  our  thought,  then 
there  must  be  respects  in  which  the  world  needs  grounding 
and  our  thought  completing.  And  these  respects  lying 
in  the  sphere  of  finite  experience,  will  be  definable.  Now  in 
all  the  preceding  discussions  pains  have  been  taken  to 
show  how  and  in  what  quarters  the  definable  needs  arise. 
But  can  definable  needs  be  met  and  satisfied  by  that  which 
is  wholly  beyond  conception,  of  which  we  can  form  no 
legitimate  idea  at  all  ?  We  must  answer  this  question  in  the 
negative  and  say  that  if  the  demand  for  an  absolute  be  an 
intelligible  demand  founded  on  definable  needs  of  the 
relative  and  finite,  then  it  follows  that  the  absolute  itself 
which  is  required  will  be  some  nature  or  being  so  far  forth 
intelligible.  The  trouble  with  modern  agnosticism  arises 
from  a  cause  similar  to  that  which  has  ruined  the  Cartesian 
philosophy.  It  sets  out  with  the  assertion  of  a  complete 
dualism  between  the  relative  and  finite,  and  the  absolute 
and  infinite.  They  are  mutually  exclusive  terms,  each 
being  the  simple  negation  of  its  opposite.  Naturally,  then, 
the  finite  can  develop  no  modes  for  conceiving  or  represent- 
ing the  infinite.  But  the  logic  of  this  position  strikes 
deeper  than  the  agnostic  thinks.  If  the  cleft  be  so  radical, 
then  the  claim  that  the  absolute  is  bound  to  the  relative 


570  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

by  necessary  implication  is  pure  illusion  and  the  absolute 
drops  out  of  existence :  there  is  only  the  relative  and  its 
affairs,  and  the  absolute  is  a  mere  dream.  The  agnostic 
with  whom  we  are  dealing  here  would  repudiate  this  con- 
clusion, but  in  doing  so  would  also  subvert  his  own 
premises ;  for  if  the  absolute  is  to  be  maintained  at  all  it  is 
because  of  its  real  connection  with  the  relative,  and  if  this 
connection  be  real  it  will  also  be  definable  in  terms  of  that 
which  the  relative  in  some  sense  requires.  But  the  relative 
does  not  require  that  which  lies  wholly  outside  of  it  and 
negates  all  its  forms  and  processes.  The  only  kind  of 
demand  the  relative  can  entertain  for  that  which  it  does 
not  itself  contain,  is  a  demand  for  completeness  in  the 
respects  in  which  it  is  incomplete.  Let  us,  for  example, 
endeavor  to  complete  the  world  on  a  purely  mechanical 
model,  representing  all  movements  in  terms  of  external  im- 
pact or  propulsion,  and  it  immediately  cries  out  for  some 
fountain  of  spontaneity,  some  self-initiative  of  motion.  Let 
us  represent  the  world  strictly  under  the  category  of  natural 
causation,  where  every  activity  is  conditioned  by  some  ante- 
cedent and  the  system  immediately  cries  out  for  the  self- 
active  ;  that  is,  for  activity  which  is  internally  self -motived. 
Thus  we  may  travel  up  and  down  the  gamut  of  our  finite 
categories  and  the  result  will  be  in  all  cases  the  same. 

We  shall  get  a  clue  to  the  real  situation  when  it  occurs 
to  us  to  ask  whether  the  dualistic  presumption  of  the 
agnostic  can  be  maintained.  Let  us  put  the  question  in 
this  form,  Have  we  any  grounds  for  characterizing  any 
experience  as  purely  or  merely  relative  or  finite?  Is  the 
absolute  or  infinite  completely  excluded  from  any  part  of 
our  experience?  We  may  answer,  of  course,  that  it  is 
always  there  by  implication,  and  this  will  be  true.  But 
this  implication  itself,  How  does  it  come  to  be  so  omni- 
present? and,  Can  it  be  further  defined?  Taking  the  last 
question  first,  we  may  say  that  this  implication  is  every- 
where translatable  into  a  demand  for  selfhood.  It  arises 
always  in  the  experience  of  some  conscious  self  which  is 


chap.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE.  57 1 

trying  to  realize  the  world,  and  it  arises  negatively  as  a  pro- 
test of  this  self  against  its  own  incompleteness,— against  the 
limitations  which  thwart  and  defeat  its  aspirations  and  its 
powers,— while  positively,  it  arises  as  a  demand  for  com- 
pleteness, a  demand  that  there  shall  be  an  experience 
complemental  to  its  own  in  which  these  limitations  are 
overcome  and  its  aims  completely  realized.  If  what  we 
call  the  finite  and  relative  self  did  not  find  its  own  expe- 
rience and  its  world  wholly  incommensurate  with  its  own 
internal  demands  on  the  real,  there  would  be  no  ground 
for  the  implications  in  question.  The  significance  of  such 
a  fact  is  clear  enough.  If  now  the  threads  of  necessary 
implication  which  lead  to  the  postulate  of  a  world  of  tran- 
scendence and  absoluteness  be  all  centered  in  our  selfhood 
and  are  expressive  of  its  fundamental  demands  upon  the 
real,  is  it  not  reasonable  to  conclude  that  in  selfhood  we 
find  either  the  absolute  itself  or  else  a  typal-form  which, 
when  ideally  completed,  will  fill  up  the  measure  of  the 
absolute  ?  Now,  that  no  being  like  you  or  me  actually  fills 
up  the  measure  of  the  absolute  in  its  experience  is  a  state- 
ment that  does  not  need  to  be  argued  at  this  stage  of  our 
inquiry.  We  are  so  keenly  conscious  of  the  limitations  and 
the  fragmentariness  of  our  best  attainments  that  so  long  as 
we  heed  the  voice  of  experience  we  shall  not  be  in  danger  of 
mistaking  ourselves  for  the  absolute.  The  other  alterna- 
tive is  not  only  more  reasonable,  but  it  fits  into  the  scheme 
of  conclusions  which  has  already  been  established.  "We 
have  seen  that  the  whole  metaphysical  interpretation  of 
the  world  proceeds  from  the  inner  standpoint  of  self-con- 
sciousness, and  that  it  is  in  the  effort  of  the  self  to  realize 
the  world  that  the  consciousness  of  the  metaphysical  impli- 
cations of  its  experience  arise.  Furthermore,  we  have  seen 
that  the  only  intelligible  key  to  the  conception  of  the 
nature  of  this  metaphysical  realm  is  supplied  in  the  form 
and  analogies  of  selfhood.  And  in  this  connection  we  have 
seen  how  the  effort  of  the  religious  consciousness  to  grasp 
and   realize  this   realm  takes  the   form   of  an   advancing 


572  DEDUCTIONS.  paet  in. 

dialectic  in  which,  through  the  analogies  of  our  selfhood- 
experience,  we  are  forever  approximating  to,  but  ever 
falling  short  of,  a  complete  and  adequate  realization  of  the 
divine.  All  this  points  in  the  direction  of  one  conclusion, 
namely,  that  selfhood  supplies  the  germ  of  an  experience 
which,  if  its  forms  could  be  completely  developed  and  all  its 
possibilities  translated  into  reality,  would  have  transcended 
the  limits  of  finitude  and  relativity  and  become  absolute. 
Our  experience  then  contains  the  germ  of  transcendence 
in  it,  and  this  germ  supplies  the  norm  of  absoluteness  and 
the  point  of  departure  for  those  analogies  which  render  the 
idea  of  an  absolute  experience  intelligible. 

All  this  may  be  conceded  without  thereby  altering  the 
fact  that  beings  like  you  and  me  shall  never  be  able  to  span 
the  gulf  that  lies  between  us  and  identification  with  the 
divine.  There  can  be  only  one  Eternal  Being;  but  we  are 
members  of  a  community  of  beings  who  are  our  fellows 
and  whose  world  we  can  by  no  means  entirely  compass. 
Our  consciousness,  while  unitary  and  tending  always  to 
reduce  the  world  to  a  unity,  can  include  only  a  finite  por- 
tion of  reality  while  other  portions  lie  outside  of  us  and 
constitute  a  world  of  not-self.  Only  that  can  be  truly 
absolute  which  includes  the  whole  sphere  of  reality  in  its 
consciousness  and  is  related,  therefore,  with  equal  direct- 
ness to  every  point  of  reality.  The  issues  of  the  absolute 
life  are  internal  and  not  external,  and  the  forms  of  its 
activity  must  be  completely  realized  self-activity  and  self- 
determination.  Our  experience  is  related  to  the  absolute, 
then,  as  one  which  in  its  limits  and  conditions  is  finite  and 
relative  but  which  has  central  in  it  a  category  that  is 
potentially  absolute.  This  category  is  selfhood  and  we, 
by  virtue  of  selfhood,  become  heirs  of  the  infinite,  and 
our  ideals  when  completed  are  all  ideals  of  an  absolute 
experience.  We  carry  the  lines  of  our  own  limited  self- 
hood on  into  infinity  and  thus  realize,  in  conception  at 
least,  the  world  of  metaphysical  reality.  That  the  absolute 
if  it  exists,  is  a  world  of  experience  and  that  the  notion 


chap.  i.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPEEIENCE.  573 

of  a  complete  experience  includes  the  distinction  between 
the  finite  and  infinite,  relative  and  absolute,  is  beyond 
reasonable  dispute. 

It  follows  from  the  fact  that  reason  itself  is  the  voice 
of  experience,  that  the  method  of  rationalism,  in  so  far  as 
it  asserts  any  aloofness  of  reason  from  experience,  must  be 
given  up.  There  can  be  no  other  reliable  method  than  that 
which  is  experiential  in  its  data  and  procedure.  Meta- 
physics is  nothing  more  than  an  interpretation  of  expe- 
rience with  a  view  to  reaching  its  full  significance.  Now, 
in  taking  this  position  we  are,  in  form  at  least,  turning 
away  from  Kant  and  going  over  to  Locke  and  the  position  of 
English  empiricism.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  this  is  more 
than  formally  true.  The  mistakes  of  Locke  and  his  school 
did  not  arise  from  their  effort  to  confine  philosophy  to 
experience,  but  rather  from  a  defective  conception  of  the 
meaning  of  experience  itself.  Had  the  Lockian  school 
come  to  its  task  free  from  the  bias  of  sensationalism,  which 
is  an  a  priori  notion  of  experience,  and  had  it  been  ready  to 
find  and  accept  whatever  in  experience  might  present  itself 
on  good  authority,  it  is  likely  that  the  work  of  the  Kantian 
revolution  would  have  been  rendered  unnecessary.  But  the 
Lockian  school,  in  prescribing  to  experience  the  limits  of  sen- 
sationalism, excluded  reason  and  had  no  concept  of  ration- 
ality left  except  one  that  stood  outside  of  experience  and 
drew  sceptical  conclusions.  In  short,  the  sceptical  reason 
seemed  to  be  the  inevitable  product  of  experientialism,  and 
this  led  to  the  Kantian  revolution  which  ought  to  have  taken 
the  form  of  an  effort  to  restore  reason  to  experience,  but 
which,  on  account  of  Kant's  own  defective  notion  of  expe- 
rience, led  to  the  placing  of  reason  above  experience  and 
the  vesting  of  it  with  an  ultra-experiential  authority.  It 
is  easy  enough  to  see  in  the  light  of  the  present  that  such 
a  remedy  must  prove  ineffective  and  that  an  ultra-expe- 
riential reason  must  either  again  become  sceptical  or 
become  again  the  organ  of  an  a  priori  dogmatism.  His- 
torically,  Kant's  movement  has  borne   fruit  in  both  di- 


574  DEDUCTIONS.  part  m. 

rections,  while  the  golden  trend  of  Kantism,  the  one  which 
has  carried  on  the  traditions  of  the  Kantian  spirit,  has  been 
ever  toward  the  closer  incorporation  of  reason  with  expe- 
rience. What  is  claimed  here  is  that  the  spiritual  aim  of 
Kantism  and,  in  fact,  the  aspiration  of  the  Lockian  move- 
ment, cannot  be  completely  realized  until  such  a  notion  of 
experience  be  reached  as  will  make  it  possible  to  regard 
reason  as  the  organ  in  which  experience  finds  its  unitary- 
expression.  On  this  basis  it  will  be  found  possible  to  heal 
the  breach  which  has  so  long  divided  the  lovers  of  truth 
into  two  hostile  camps.  It  is  not  to  be  supposed,  however, 
that  in  thus  frankly  grounding  philosophy  in  experience, 
anything  of  value  has  been  sacrificed,  or  that  the  world 
has  grown  less  rich  than  it  was  before.  Even  the  world  of 
rationalism  with  its  categories  of  reason  will  not  be  lost. 
But  it  will  be  transformed  and  its  categories  will  become 
the  flexible  forms  of  an  experience-content  which  is  ever 
changing.  Nor  will  the  world  of  the  sensational  empiricist 
be  altogether  lost.  It  will  be  only  transformed  and  he  will 
find  himself  with  all  his  cherished  possessions  in  a  world 
the  rich  potentialities  of  which  had  never  entered  his 
dreams. 

Let  us,  then,  as  the  final  effort  of  this  chapter,  en- 
deavor to  represent  the  way  in  which  experience  effects 
the  synthesis  of  the  sensational  and  the  rational  in  its 
processes.  Plato,  under  the  figure  of  the  prisoner  bound 
in  the  cave,  represents  the  way  in  which  he  conceives  the 
soul  to  be  delivered  from  the  illusions  of  the  world  of  sense 
and  brought  to  the  realization  of  the  truth.  Now  Plato's 
representation  is  somewhat  too  fanciful  and  it  is  colored 
by  his  own  disbelief  in  the  senses.  "We,  of  course,  admit 
the  illusoriness  of  the  senses.  No  doubt  the  life  of  sense 
is  pervaded  with  illusions  and  its  presentations  possess  a 
minimum  of  reality.  Nevertheless,  we  have  harkened  to 
the  voice  of  Aristotle  and  believe  that  the  senses  possess  a 
core  of  solid  epistemological  value.  Plato  represents  one  side 
of  the  process,  the  cure  of  illusion,  but  where  he  fails  and 


chap.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE.  575 

where  Aristotle  succeeds,  is  in  detecting  a  golden  thread  of 
reliable  truth  running  through  this  world  of  illusion. 
Without  following  Aristotle  closely,  let  us  mark  in  our  own 
way  the  stages  of  the  process.1  If  with  the  old  empiricists 
we  persist  in  representing  consciousness  as  a  passive  recip- 
ient of  sensations  or  impressions  which  it,  when  aroused  to 
activity,  seeks  to  organize  into  a  world,  it  is  not  likely  that 
we  shall  ever  be  able  to  reach  any  fruitful  results.  There 
is,  however,  another  point  of  view  which  we  may  charac- 
terize in  one  aspect  as  dynamic,  and  in  another,  as  genetic, 
that  promises  better  things.  According  to  this  altered 
way  of  looking  at  things,  consciousness  is  at  no  stage  purely 
passive  but  acts  and  reacts  upon  the  world  in  accordance 
with  laws  of  its  own  nature.  Furthermore,  consciousness 
is  from  the  outset  a  germinal  self  and  has  in  it  the  norm  of 
its  distinction  from  the  world.  Its  activity  will  from  the 
outset,  then,  take  the  form  of  an  effort  to  realize  the  world, 
an  effort  in  which  it  seeks  to  overcome  and  assimilate  what 
is  called  its  environment  and  in  connection  with  which  it 
gradually  comes  into  possession  of  itself.  If,  now,  we  con- 
fine ourselves  to  the  epistemological  side  of  the  problem, 
Ave  find  that  what  is  called  its  sensory  stage  is  one  in  which 
consciousness  takes  its  first  steps  both  in  the  realization  of 
the  objective  world  and  in  the  realization  of  self.  On  the 
objective  side  its  efforts  lead  to  the  gradual  definition  of  the 
world  under  the  forms  of  space  and  time  and  the  feature 
of  the  situation  of  special  import  here,  is  the  fact  that  it  is 
out  of  this  effort  that  both  form  and  content  of  knowledge 
emerge.  Consciousness  develops  its  forms  in  the  same  way 
it  develops  its  content.  It  does  not  create  either,  but 
finds  both  as  factors  arising  in  an  undivided  experience. 
Beyond  the  first  sensory  stage  of  representation  in  space 
and  time,  we  find  the  knowing  consciousness  pushing  out 

1  One  of  the  striking  features  of  Aristotle's  method  is  the  fact 
that  in  his  most  abstract  thinking  he  never  loses  contact  with  ex- 
perience. This  I  apprehend  is  one  source  of  the  extraordinary 
virility  of  his  thought. 


576  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

into  a  sphere  of  further  realization  through  the  medium 
of  its  dynamic  forms,  thus  achieving  the  world  of  forces 
and  activities,  while  bej^ond  this  as  a  final  stage  it  develops 
through  its  aesthetic  activity  the  forms  of  a  unified  world 
of  objective  experience.  Along  with  this  objective  process 
and  inseparable  from  it,  arise  the  progressive  stages  of  self- 
realization,  so  that  the  subject  world  develops  pari  passu 
with  the  objective,  and  experience  as  a  whole  unfolds  a 
representation  in  which  the  subject  stands  central  and  to 
which  the  whole  world  of  objectivity  is  translated  into 
realized  content.  Thus  we  find  that  knowledge  as  a  whole, 
becomes  a  function  of  experience,  and  its  categories  and 
principles  of  rational  construction  arise  and  develop  as 
intra-experiential  and  inseparable  from  the  matter  which 
they  define  and  unify. 

Now,  we  have  tried  to  make  it  clear  in  the  earlier  chap- 
ters of  this  discussion  that  we  achieve  the  true  point  of 
view  in  metaplrysics  when  we  restore  the  knowledge-process 
to  its  place  as  an  element  in  a  larger  and  more  concrete 
activity  of  experience.  We  do  not  need  to  be  told  that 
there  is  such  a  thing  as  will  or  volition  in  experience  and 
that  the  aim  of  volitional  activity  is  the  achievement  of 
good.  Nor  do  we  need  to  be  told  that  there  is  such  a  thing 
as  feeling  in  experience  which  takes  the  form  of  interest 
and  has  for  its  end  emotional  satisfaction.  Nor  do  we  need 
to  be  told  at  this  stage  of  our  progress,  that  this  concrete 
experience-activity  supplies  to  us  the  true  organ  of  meta- 
physics, or  that  the  effort  to  know  and  realize  is  motived 
and  determined  by  the  demands  of  a  consciousness  which 
seeks  the  satisfaction  of  the  whole  individual  nature.  "We 
have  seen  that  it  is  only  when  the  impulse  to  realize  the 
world  flows  from  this  concrete  spring  and  when  the  scope 
of  our  activity  is  determined  by  the  requirement,  that  the 
whole  interest  of  our  being  shall  find  satisfaction  in  its 
object,  that  experience  develops  an  organ  of  rationality 
which  is  adequate  to  the  task  we  impose  upon  it  when 
we   require   it  to   lead  us  into  the   inner  court   of   real- 


chap.  I.  PHILOSOPHY  AND  EXPERIENCE.  577 

ity.  We  do  not  need* to  go  over  again  the  details  of  our 
demonstration  that  the  final  rationality  which  utters  the 
whole  requirement  of  experience  is  teleological  in  its  spirit 
and  form  and  that  it  embodies  itself  in  the  activity  of  pur- 
pose. Our  metaphysics,  then,  will  be  a  discipline  the  aim 
of  which  is  to  interpret  the  final  meaning  of  experience 
as  a  whole  in  the  terms  of  a  purpose  in  which  the  whole 
is  intended,  and  an  end  in  which  it  is  ideally  completed. 
Entering  upon  his  work  in  this  spirit,  the  metaphysical  in- 
vestigator finds  that  his  first  task  consists  in  dealing  with 
different  strata  of  experience  which  have  different  degrees 
of  significance.  These  strata  range  themselves,  as  he 
learns,  into  a  series,  and  the  terms  of  the  metaphysical 
interpretation  are  filled  out  by  degrees  as  he  travels  up  the 
scale  until  at  last,  as  we  have  found,  they  complete  them- 
selves in  the  sphere  of  religion. 

The  process  by  which  this  result  is  obtained  is  an  ex- 
ploration of  experience  under  the  guidance  of  a  principle 
which  has  been  developed  as  an  organ  of  experience  itself. 
Now  the  steps  which  we  propose  to  take  in  the  remaining 
chapters  of  this  discussion  represent  but  a  further  ap- 
plication of  the  same  method.  We  enter  here  on  the  task  of 
a  special  application  of  principles  to  the  development  of 
conceptions  of  nature,  God,  man  and  his  destiny.  But  the 
concrete  demand  we  are  seeking  to  serve  is  the  most  vital  in- 
terest of  experience.  Man's  experience  is  such  that  there 
arises  in  his  world  the  distinction  between  himself  and  what 
he  calls  nature,  and  the  distinction  between  himself  and 
God.  How  these  distinctions  arise  and  how  each  is  to  be 
interpreted  in  itself  and  in  its  relations  with  the  rest,  are 
problems  which  any  philosophy  that  would  be  at  all  com- 
plete must  take  up  and  answer  so  far  as  that  may  be  possi- 
ble. But  in  the  whole  investigation,  whatever  sea  of  abstrac- 
tions we  may  have  to  sail  through,  it  must  be  ever  present 
to  our  mind  that  the  world  we  are  dealing  with  is  the  world 
of  experience  in  which  we  men  and  women  live,  and  that 
the  concrete  interest  we  are  seeking  to  serve  is  the  most  vital 
37 


578  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

and  pressing  of  all  the  interests  -to  which  we  mortals 
respond.  The  nature  with  which  we  shall  be  concerned 
in  the  following  chapter  is  a  nature  that  affects  "our  busi- 
ness and  our  bosoms"  and  the  God  of  whom  we  shall  have 
something  to  say  in  another  chapter  is  that  being  who  in 
the  religious  consciousness  becomes  the  most  intimate  com- 
panion of  our  lives,  while  the  man  of  our  discussion  will  be 
just  the  faulty  but  aspiring  mortal  we  so  well  know,  a 
being  the  very  imperfections  of  whose  nature  lead  him  to 
fix  his  heart  on  God  and  the  hope  of  an  immortal  life. 


CHAPTER  II. 


NATUKE. 


The  plain  man  is  likely  to  regard  the  notion  of  nature  as 
an  original  possession.  He  cannot  remember  the  time 
when  this  solid  world  which  supports  or  arrests  his  efforts 
did  not  stretch  above  and  beneath  him  pretty  much  as  it 
does  at  present.  Anyone  who  should  venture  to  tell  him 
that  there  was  a  time  when  no  vestige  of  such  a  world 
existed  to  him,  would  scarcely  have  his  assertion  credited. 
And  yet  this  is  the  story  psychology  has  been  telling  us 
since  Locke.  Judge  of  the  plain  man's  state  of  mind,  then, 
when  he  begins  to  be  initiated  into  the  Berkeleyan  vision  of 
the  subjectivity  of  the  external  world.  His  esse  est  per  dpi 
will  be  little  more  than  a  cry  of  amazement  at  the  revela- 
tion, and  Berkeley's  conclusion  that  the  external  world  is 
nothing  more  than  a  man's  idea  in  his  own  mind  will  come 
to  him  as  the  announcement  of  the  eclipse  of  all  reality.1 
To  him  the  solid  world  of  his  implicit  faith  has  collapsed 
and  there  only  remains  a  sort  of  subjective  dream-image 
which  he  carries  about  with  him  and  which  surprises  him 
so  often  by  behaving  so  very  much  like  the  old  solid  world 
which  has  disappeared.     Now  it  is  not  our  purpose  here  to 

1  There  is  no  intention  here  to  derogate  anything  from  the  great 
value  of  Berkeley's  work.  The  study  of  Berkeley  makes  an  epoch 
in  the  intellectual  history  of  the  individual  just  as  it  made  an  epoch 
in  that  of  Europe  when  the  works  first  appeared.  But  Berkeley 
represents  a  starting-point   rather  than  a  goal  of  thinking. 

579 


580  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

follow  up  the  personal  history  of  the  plain  man  in  order  to 
show  how  his  mental  balance  is  gradually  restored;  for 
restored  it  will  be  and  restored  the  balance  has  been,  since 
the  time  of  Berkeley.  This  is  only  to  say  that  sub- 
jective idealism  has  gone  very  much  out  of  vogue  and 
thai  men  are  beginning  to  realize  how  their  processes 
of  knowledge  may  lead  them  to  the  apprehension  of  a 
stable  world  of  objectivity.  The  first  lesson  which  the 
plain  man,  who  has  been  thus  awakened,  learns  is  that  the 
world  of  his  present  perception,  the  sphere  which  he  calls 
nature,  did  not  always  exist  to  him  but  is  an  acquired 
possession.  When  his  astonishment  at  this  discovery  has 
somewhat  subsided  and  he  begins  to  investigate  the  new 
situation,  this  is  what  he  discovers.  The  color  of  the  rose 
seems  to  him  to  be  a  solid  possession  of  the  rose,  but  the 
physiologist  tells  him  that  the  color  he  sees  is  a  reaction  of 
his  consciousness  on  certain  movements  of  his  optical 
nerves,  while  the  optical  expert  will  further  inform  him 
that  these  nerve  vibrations  are  but  the  transmission  within 
the  organism  of  certain  molecular  impacts  caused  by  the 
reaction  of  light  waves  upon  the  tissue  of  the  rose  which 
in  its  turn  is  reducible  to  molecular  motion.  This  result 
may  be  generalized  till  it  has  been  learned  that  in  the  field 
of  what  Locke  calls  the  secondary  qualities  of  things  the 
consciousness  of  man  may  be  compared  to  a  'sensorigraph' 
registering  the  impressions  that  come  to  it  from  it  knows 
not  where.  In  his  consternation  at  this  result  he  may,  like 
the  drowning  man,  lay  hold  of  what  Locke  calls  the  primary 
qualities  of  things,  and  imagine  that  here  he  has  found 
something  solid  to  cling  to,  but  here  again  the  logic  of 
science  is  merciless  and  he  is  forced  to  admit  that  his  space 
and  time  and  solidity,  come  to  him,  like  his  other  possessions, 
through  the  process  of  the  registration  of  symbols  of  un- 
known forces  in  his  own  consciousness. 

It  is  no  cause  for  marvel  that  the  plain  man  should 
lose  his  faith  in  things  when  he  makes  this  discovery,  or 
that  he  should  become  sceptical.     In  fact,  the  case  is  alto- 


chap.  ii.  NATURE.  581 

gether  as  bad  as  it  appears  to  him.  Only,  the  way  to  over- 
come the  difficulties  of  the  situation  is  not  to  turn  our 
backs  upon  it,  but  rather  to  press  on  and  make  the  best 
of  it.  Had  Bunyan's  Christian  turned  and  fled,  he 
never  would  have  discovered  that  the  lions  were  chained 
and  harmless.  The  very  first  step  in  the  right  direction  is 
the  acceptance  of  the  whole  revelation  of  science.  There 
are  the  lions  and  we  must  make  the  best  of  them.  The 
world  is,  to  start  with,  pretty  much  as  science  depicts  it. 
"We  are  like  infants  crying  in  the  dark,"  the  poet  sings, 
and  in  truth  it  is  a  dark  world  which  welcomes  the  infant's 
first  cry.  But  let  the  baby  take  courage.  His  darkness 
will  begin  to  vanish  and  here  and  there  rays  of  light 
will  break  in.  The  chaos  of  his  first  impressions  will  begin 
to  disappear  and  germs  of  order  will  arise  here  and  there. 
His  void  world  will  begin  to  give  place  to  order  and  the 
spirit  "moving  on  the  face  of  the  deep"  will  start  here  and 
there  an  unfolding  germ  of  intelligible  form.  Let  the  plain 
man  become  a  genetic  psychologist  and  hark  back  to  his  in- 
fant days ;  he  will  not  find  his  world  so  hopeless.  He  will 
learn  that  his  great  business  while  he  was  a  baby  and  during 
the  years  before  he  emerged  into  self-conscious  boyhood  was 
the  building  up  of  a  world  piece  by  piece  and  element  by 
element,  and  he  will  find  the  story  of  his  childhood  genius 
a  wonderful  one,  out-rivalling  all  the  tales  of  fairy-land. 
He  will  find  it  to  be  literally  true  that  his  whole  world 
and  the  only  world  he  knoAvs  or  can  infer,  has  come  to 
him  through  the  little  aperture  of  his  own  consciousness,— 
that  his  whole  universe  is  one  which  he  has,  at  infinite  pains 
and  through  a  complexity  of  process  which  makes  his  head 
swim,  spelled  out  in  terms  of  his  own  conscious  symbols. 
He  will  learn  how,  by  slow  degrees,  he  has  become  cognizant 
of  the  psychic  world  of  other  beings  like  himself  and  how 
his  world  of  space  and  time  has  progressively  unrolled  itself, 
and  how  the  things  of  this  world  have  gradually  taken  form 
and  arrangement  and  definite  and  predictable  motion.  He 
will  learn  how,  at  a  certain  point,  the  world  of  presentation 


582  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

sent  him  back  to  look  curiously  in  the  dark  background 
for  the  causes  and  conditions  of  its  happenings  and  how 
this  search  opened  up  a  new  phase  of  organization  and  a 
new  chapter  of  world-experience.  And  he  will  learn  with 
amazement  how,  in  this  process  of  building  up  a  world  out 
of  symbolic  terms  in  his  own  consciousness,  he  has  been 
gradually  building  up  also  a  vision  of  a  subject-world 
which  he  calls  himself.  Now,  the  lesson  he  has  been  learn- 
ing here,  and  which  we  moderns  have  been  so  slow  to  ac- 
quire, is  that  there  is  no  other  way  by  which  we  can  come 
to  the  realization  of  any  intelligible  world  but  the  way  of 
this  genetic  experience-process.  We  look  in  vain,  then,  for 
any  world  outside  of  experience  and  any  attempt  to  con- 
struct an  intelligible  sphere  outside  the  limits  of  possible 
experience  is  sure  to  be  guided  and  informed  by  expe- 
rience-analogies. Nor  have  we  completely  oriented  our- 
selves in  this  regard  until  we  have  learned  to  look  within 
experience  for  the  grounds  of  those  distinctions,  which 
we  have  been  accustomed  to  seek  outside  of  experience  in 
some  field  of  the  a  priori.  For  when  we  have  learned  to 
look  within  experience  for  all  our  possessions,  the  revelation 
soon  comes  to  us  that  we  have  not  lost  the  old  solid  world 
of  our  native  faith,  but  that  it  has  simply  been  transformed. 
In  the  new  world  of  experience  we  recognize  an  old  friend 
in  a  new  dress,  and  even  the  dress  itself  is  not  so  different, 
but  only  shows  so  in  the  angle  from  which  we  view  it. 
What  we  mean  by  this  figurative  language  is  that  we  learn 
with  the  plain  man  that  a  world,  in  order  to  be  solidly  and 
stably  grounded,  does  not  need  to  hold  itself  aloof  from 
experience.  Rather,  if  it  did  so  it  would  never  enter  into 
the  field  of  our  cognitions,  and  we  could  at  best  only  vaguely 
suppose  its  existence.  But  the  experience-process  itself  leads 
to  that  which  is  solid  and  stable  as  well  as  to  that  which 
is  unstable  and  the  fashion  of  which  changes.  We  learn, 
therefore  (and  this  is  almost  the  last  insight  that  comes  to 
us),  that  the  experience-process  does  not  mean  subjective 
idealism,  but  rather  a  sphere  of  reality  which  is  solidly  and 


chap.  il.  NATUKE.  583 

objectively  grounded.  The  esse  is  pcrcipi,  if  we  mean 
simply  to  describe  the  epistemological  process  by  which 
anything  is  apprehended.  But  esse  is  not  percipi  if  we 
mean  by  it  that  the  process  yields  nothing  but  its  own 
procession.  The  process  gives  us  the  world  of  existents, 
and  the  thing  of  cognition  is  the  permanent  precipitate 
of  the  processes  out  of  which  it  has  emerged.  The  Berke- 
leyan  has  this  great  lesson  to  learn,  and  in  learning  it 
he  linds  his  subjective  idealism  changing  into  something 
that  may  from  one  point  of  view  be  called  transformed 
Lockism.  since  it  is  a  philosophy  of  experience  and  repu- 
diates ultra-experiential  terms ;  while,  from  another  point  of 
view,  it  may  be  called  transformed  Kantism,  inasmuch  as  it 
finds  in  experience  the  distinction  which  Kant  also  found 
and  emphasized,  and  only  denies  Kant's  contention  that 
these  distinctions  are  to  be  looked  for  outside  of  experience. 
We  are  in  a  position  now  to  begin  the  discussion  of  the 
conception  of  nature,  and  the  first  problem  we  shall  con- 
sider is  that  of  its  origin.  We  have  already  learned  that 
we  do  not  have  any  original  knowledge  of  nature.  But 
nature  stands  out  in  such  sharp  contrast  to  the  sphere  of 
psychic  and  social  experience  that  it  has  been  an  almost 
universal  conviction  among  men  that  somehow  the  cognition 
of  nature  antedates  that  of  the  social  world  and  that  the 
social  world  presupposes  the  cognition  of  nature  as  its  solid 
support.  The  refutation  of  this  view  of  the  matter  comes 
partly  from  the  social  psychologists  and  partly  from  the 
epistemological  idealists.  The  social  psychologist  is  able 
to  show  experimentally  that  the  first  world  of  the  child  is 
a  social  one;  that  it  is  peopled  with  living  beings  who  re- 
spond in  a  social  way,  before  it  becomes  peopled  with 
inanimate  things  which  respond  in  a  mechanical  way. 
Now,  the  epistemological  idealist  goes  beyond  the  results  of 
the  psychologist  and  professes  to  show  us  the  precise 
mode  in  which  our  concept  of  nature  is  developed  out  of 
social  soil.  He  starts  out  with  the  proposition  that  our 
common  knowledge  is  made  up  of  objectively  describable 


584  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

terms  which  are  accessible  to  many  observers  and  npon 
which  these  many  can  agree  or  disagree.  This  process  of 
objective  description  and  comparison,  which  we  have  else- 
where characterized  as  the  equating  function  of  the  social 
consciousness,  leads,  the  epistemological  idealist  asserts,  in 
the  first  place  to  the  emergence  of  the  categories,  which  are 
simply  social  equations  of  the  broadest  possible  generality, 
and  these  in  turn  lead  to  the  organization  of  the  results 
of  our  social  experience  into  the  different  spheres  of  reality. 
Some  of  these  socially  equated  results  remain  psychic  and 
social  in  their  character,  but  there  is  a  class  of  them  which 
tends  to  become  dissociated  from  the  mass  of  social  gener- 
alizations and  form  an  organized  body  which  is  relatively 
independent  of  our  ordinary  social  reactions.  This  or- 
ganized body  we  learn  to  call  nature  and  we  give  it  in  our 
thoughts  a  standing  outside  of  our  social  experience,  and  in 
the  end  come  to  regard  it  as  not  only  independent,  but  as 
the  necessary  ontological  ground  of  the  social  experience 
itself.  The  epistemological  idealist  admits  these  later 
stages,  but  is  supposed  to  deny  their  validity  and  to  take 
the  ground  that  nature  has  no  ontological  significance 
apart  from  the  social  process  out  of  which  it  has  emerged. 
It  is  clear  that  this  is  the  Berkeleyan  idealism  writ  large  in 
social  characters,  and  at  a  later  stage  we  shall  call  it  up  for 
some  criticism.  Here  we  are  interested  only  in  the  way 
in  which  the  conception  of  nature  is  connected  with  the 
experience-process  on  its  social  side,  and  in  this  we  are  in 
agreement  with  the  epistemological  idealist.  .We  agree 
that  the  cognition  of  nature  arises  out  of  the  reactions  of 
social  experience,  but  when  we  ask  further  what  kind  of 
social  experiences  these  are,  we  find  that  we  must  draw  a 
distinction  between  reactions  which  are  social  on  both  sides, 
—that  is,  the  interactions  of  living  agents  like  ourselves,— 
and  certain  reactions  which  do  not  fulfill  this  model,  one 
side  of  which,— the  other  than  ourselves,— reacts  in  a  way 
that  we  learn  to  call  mechanical.  And  this  way  which  we 
call  mechanical  we  learn  in  time  to  associate  with  things 


chap.  ii.  NATURE.  585 

that  react  as  though  lacking  in  subjective  impulse  and  in- 
tention and  as  though  impelled  purely  by  a  motive  that  is 
external  to  them.  These,  however,  are  later  discoveries 
which  affect  only  in  a  dimly  apprehended  way  the  earlier 
experiences.  But  what  we  are  contending  for  here  is  the 
Eacl  that  the  conception  of  nature  originates  as  the  notion 
of  a  kind  of  agency  that  differs  from  agency  in  its  purely 
social  form.  And  this  difference  gradually  defines  itself 
along  the  lines  we  have  indicated.  In  short,  nature  is,  in 
the  first  instance  and  fundamentally,  a  dynamic  conception. 
In  our  social  experiences  a  class  of  reactions  that  are 
mechanical  in  their  form  are  gradually  sloughed  off  from 
the  social  base  and  tend  to  form  an  organism  of  their  own. 
No  doubt  this  mechanical  group,  when  once  it  has  been  seg- 
gregated,  from  the  social,  wTill  appear  to  be  the  special  world 
of  space  and  time,  but  the  fact  is  that  space  and  time  are  also 
forms  of  the  social  world  and  it  is  hard  to  see  how  any 
point  of  differentiation  between  the  two  worlds  could  possi- 
bly arise  in  connection  with  these  categories.  It  is  possible 
to  abstract  space  and  time  from  their  social  content,  and 
then  it  is  found  that  these  categories  are  open  to  pure 
mechanical  treatment,  but  if  we  were  to  seek  in  space  and 
time  for  the  point  of  differentiation  between  the  social 
world  and  nature,  we  should  never  find  it.  The  concept  of 
nature  is  dynamic  and  the  germ  of  it  is  reached  when  we 
begin  to  differentiate  from  the  social  those  forms  of  agency 
which  seem  to  act  in  a  way  that  is  fatalistic  and  determined 
by  external  impulse. 

Now  the  organization  of  the  conception  of  nature  is,  no 
doubt,  one  that  passes  through  devious  stages.  The  first 
step  is,  no  doubt,  the  separation  of  what  we  call  material, 
inanimate  things  off  into  groups  by  themselves  where  they 
constitute  our  world  of  brute  matter  and  physical  forces. 
The  second,  which  is  doubtless  largely  contemporaneous, 
will  be  the  incorporation  of  the  space-  and  time-categories 
specially  with  this  non-social,  material  group.  There  must 
be  a  psychological  reason  why  space  and  time  seem  so  much 


586  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

more  germane  to  nature  than  to  any  other  department  of 
experience,  and  the  reason,  no  doubt,  is  that  these  cate- 
gories fit  so  perfectly  into  a  system  of  mechanical  agencies. 
The  mathematician  in  his  calculations,  for  example,  does 
not  think  of  social  space  and  time.  His  instinctive  refer- 
ence is  to  nature.  Having  incorporated  the  sphere  of 
mechanical  reaction  with  the  space  and  time  media,  the 
world  of  the  plain,  unreflecting  man  becomes  and  con- 
tinues to  be  that  vaguely  denned  sphere  of  material  things 
and  forces  which  stretches  out  indefinitely  in  space  and  out 
into  the  past  and  future  in  time.  But  the  notion  of  nature 
being  dynamic,  and  space  possessing  no  obvious  dynamic 
quality,  the  plain  man  does  not  trouble  himself  so  much 
about  space.  This  is  true  even  when  he  has  to  travel  over 
it  and  there  is  a  mountain  in  the  way,  for  his  first  interest 
even  here  is  in  the  time  and  effort  it  is  going  to  cost  him. 
But  the  time-aspect  of  nature  is  a  point  of  direct  concern 
to  him.  Time  is  a  dynamic  category,  being  the  form  of  his 
own  effort-consciousness,  and  as  a  form  of  the  movements 
of  nature  it  supplies  the  starting-point  for  a  new  step  in 
the  development  of  the  concept  of  nature. 

When  we  stop  to  reflect,  we  shall  see  how  defective 
a  concept  of  nature  is  that  represents  it  only  as  a  sys- 
tem of  agencies  acting  in  the  media  of  space  and  time. 
Such  a  nature  might  exist  and  yet  be  a  wholly  unintel- 
ligible sphere.  Two  prime  requisites  of  nature  as  we 
conceive  it  are  uniformity  and  stability.  Uniformity  is 
immediately  related  to  time.  Nature  as  a  dynamic  sys- 
tem takes  the  form  of  time  and  presents  its  most  interesting 
aspect  to  us  in  the  time-series  of  events.  Nature  is  a 
system  in  regard  to  which  we  learn  to  entertain  certain 
expectations  and  the  most  fundamental  of  these  is  that  it 
will  not  proceed  by  fits  and  starts  but  uniformly  and  as 
though  it  were  guided  by  some  definite  and  fixed  pro- 
gramme. In  short,  our  lives  having  become  fitted  into  the 
molds  of  nature  and  adapted  to  its  ordinary  mode  of  pro- 


chap.  ii.  NATURE.  557 

cedure,  we  have  come  to  expect  that  it  will  not  depart 
violently  or  radically  from  the  order  which  it  already 
observes.  This  is  an  essential  part  of  the  concept  of  na- 
ture, for  it  is  clear  that  a  system  of  things  in  regard  to 
which  we  could  not  make  the  assumption  of  uniformity 
could  not  rise  to  the  dignity  of  a  conception  of  nature. 
Where,  then,  there  is  nature  there  must  be  order,  and 
where  there  is  order  there  will  be  uniformity.  Now,  Mr. 
John  Stuart  Mill  sought  to  ground  our  belief  in  the  uni- 
formity of  nature  in  our  experience  of  its  uniformity,  and 
there  is  a  sense  in  which  the  position  is  sound,  for  if  there 
be  uniformity  in  the  world  at  all  it  will  be  come  upon  in  our 
experience,  and  were  it  not  so  come  upon  it  could  not  be 
presumed.  The  fault  of  Mill  did  not  consist  in  founding 
our  belief  in  the  uniformity  of  nature  on  experience,  but 
rather  in  not  rooting  it  profoundly  enough  in  experience. 
This  is  remedied  to  some  extent  in  the  doctrine  of  the 
social  origin  of  the  idea  of  nature,  for  here  it  is  the  most 
general  and,  therefore,  the  most  uniform  elements  that 
enter,  fundamentally,  into  the  constitution  of  nature. 
This,  however,  does  not  completely  meet  the  difficulty,  and 
there  is  still  room  for  the  contention  of  Kant  that  an 
a  priori  element  enters  into  the  constitution  of  nature. 
Only,  we  shall  find  it  incumbent  to  deny  the  a  priori  claim  as 
Kant  conceives  it  and  seek  its  equivalent  somewhere  within 
the  limits  of  experience.  Let  us  put  the  question  in  this 
way :  Do  we  learn  to  expect  the  uniform  behavior  of  nature 
simply  from  our  experience  of  its  past  behavior  ?  or  is  there 
some  deeper  reason  for  this  expectation?  The  answer  of 
Mill,  which  affirms  the  first  part  of  our  question,  virtually 
assumes  that  there  is  an  objective  nature  to  which  we  have 
simply  to  adapt  ourselves.  But  the  case  is  not  quite  so 
simple  as  this.  In  the  beginning  there  is  no  nature  and 
we  have  in  a  true  sense  to  build  up  our  world.  The  social 
theory  recognizes  this  fact  and  is,  so  far  forth,  more  satis- 
factory.    But  the  social  theory  itself  does  not  quite  go  to 


588  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

the  bottom  of  the  question.  It  gives  the  modus  of  the 
organization,  so  to  speak,  but  not  the  motive.  We  wish 
to  know  something  more  than  the  way  in  which  nature 
arises.  We  want  to  know  why  there  should  be  any  nature ; 
or,  to  shape  our  question  more  specifically  in  view  of  the 
point  at  issue,  we  want  to  know  why  there  is  any  necessity 
that  nature  should  behave  uniformly.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
when  we  view  nature  from  certain  standpoints,  there  is  no 
uniformity  but  incessant  variety.  It  is  scarcely  an  exag- 
geration to  say  that  nature  never  repeats  itself.  What 
do  we  mean  by  the  uniformity  of  nature  in  a  world  of  such 
infinite  variation,  and  what  would  it  matter  if  there  were 
a  little  more  variety  and  if  the  sun's  rays  should  some- 
times melt  ice  and  sometimes  make  it?  Or  that  the  earth 
we  walk  on  should  sometimes  resist  our  tread  and  some- 
times yield  to  it?  The  answer  could  not  be  found  in  the 
nature  of  these  changes  themselves.  That  the  operation  of 
the  sun's  ray  should  be  accompanied  now  with  the  melting 
of  ice  and  again  with  its  formation  would  present  itself 
simply  as  an  additional  circumstance  in  the  constant  changes 
which  are  taking  place,  and  which  in  themselves  would  call 
forth  no  special  remark.  The  root-motive  is  to  be  sought 
elsewhere,  in  the  relation  of  these  changes  to  our  purposes. 
The  uniformity  of  nature  which  we  predict  is  not  any  mon- 
otony of  sameness,  but  rather  a  mode  of  procedure  that  will 
be  consistent  with  our  purposes. 

This  is  a  hard  saying  and  the  fact  that  nature  seems 
to  be  the  one  sphere  of  activity  which  is  wholly  indif- 
ferent to  our  purposes  makes  it  seem  like  adamant.  But 
let  us  consider  what  the  proposition  really  means.  It 
is  safe  to  say  that  our  knowledge  of  nature  does  not 
extend  beyond  the  limits  of  our  interest  in  nature  and 
that  there  is  a  certain  kind  of  interest  which  has  motived  the 
whole  social  process  through  which  the  cognition  of  nature 
has  arisen.  What  is  this  interest?  It  is  the  interest  we 
have  in  generalization  which   is  simply  a  search  for  the 


chap.  ii.  NATURE.  589 

common,— for  that  which  maintains  itself  in  a  world  of 
changes.  This  interest  is  the  immediate  demand  of  the 
fundamental  purpose  or  aim  of  our  own  conscious  striving ; 
namely,  that  we  should  survive  and  maintain  ourselves  in 
the  world  in  which  our  lot  is  cast.  Fundamentally,  we 
build  up  the  world  for  our  own  purposes  and  what  we 
call  nature  is  the  part  of  it  that  stands  as  the  solid 
background  of  our  purposes.  The  uniformity  which  we  ex- 
pect and  predict  of  nature  is  nothing  more  than  its  continu- 
ing to  serve  as  a  fitting  background  for  the  fundamental 
purpose  of  living.  We  do  not  regard  the  ordinary  changes 
of  things  or  even  the  convulsions  of  nature  as  violations  of 
this  uniformity,  since  the  purposes  of  living  can  be  realized 
in  spite  of  their  occurrence.  But  were  the  chemical  elements 
to  be  constantly  changing  their  properties  so  that  the  same 
compounds  would  be  at  one  time  nutritious  and  at  another 
poisonous;  were  the  heat  of  the  sun  or  fire  at  one  time  to 
boil  water  and  at  another  to  harden  it  into  ice;  were  the 
alternations  of  season  to  occur  in  a  wholly  unpredictable 
manner  so  that  the  farmer  could  not  tell  whether  his  crops 
were  to  be  matured  or  destroyed,  and  were  there  no  as- 
surance that  wheat  should  produce  wheat  and  not  tares,— 
were  such  changes  to  occur,  then  the  world  would  be  one 
whose  movements  were  inconsistent  with  the  fundamental 
aims  of  life.  In  short,  from  the  point  of  view  of  these 
fundamental  aims,  it  would  be  wholly  irrational,  capricious 
and  evil.  The  uniformity  we  predict  in  nature  is  simply 
the  congruity  of  its  movements  with  the  fundamental  aims 
of  living ;  it  is,  in  short,  a  prediction  that  nature  in  relation 
to  the  fundamental  aims  of  life  will  be  rational,  orderly 
and  good. 

That  we  have  here  struck  the  root  of  our  confidence  in 
the  uniformity  of  nature,  I  verily  believe,  for  we  see  now 
that  this  confidence  does  not  rest  wholly  upon  our  calcula- 
tion of  the  past  procedure  of  nature,  but  that  it  is  more 
deeply  grounded  in  the  constitution  of  things  and  expresses 


590  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

that  deep  demand  which  we  make  on  the  world,  namely, 
that  it  shall  be  rational  and  good  rather  than  irrational  and 
evil.1 

Now  this  representation  is  open,  we  admit,  to  the 
objection  that  it  tends  to  take  away  the  lawful  independence 
of  nature  by  reducing  it  to  a  mere  pendant  of  our 
own  purposes.  But  we  are  not  yet  through  with  the  con- 
ception of  nature.  Deeper  than  our  belief  in  the  uni- 
formity of  nature  is  our  faith  in  its  stability.  Uniformity, 
as  we  saw,  is  reducible  to  congruity  with  our  fundamental 
life-aims  and  excludes  only  the  changes  that  would  be 
inconsistent  with  these.  The  postulate  of  stability  is  one, 
however,  that  goes  beyond  the  limits  of  this  subjective  re- 
quirement. What  do  we  mean  by  stability?  Let  us  bear 
in  mind  that  the  notion  of  nature  is  dynamic,  that  it  is 
constituted  of  a  system  of  agencies  or  movements,  and  that 
the  notion  of  stability  will  be  that  of  permanence  of  func- 
tion or  mode  of  behavior.  The  postulate  of  stability  involves, 
then,  the  elimination  of  caprice,  accident  or  chance  out  of 
the  foundations  of  nature.  The  stable  will  then  be  a  nature 
that  has  elements  of  constitution  which  do  not  change 
and  which  ground  activities  that  maintain  themselves 
even  in  the  midst  of  changes  of  form  or  direction.  If  we 
eliminate  from  the  changing  that  which  ceases  to  exist  and 
is  followed  by  other  than  itself,  then  what  remains  is  the 
stable  which  is  not  subject  to  change.  The  stable  may  change 
its  form  or  direction,  but  then  the  form  or  direction  will 
not  be  stable.  It  is  clear  that  stability  is  possible  only 
where  self-identity  is  maintained,  and  we  might  define 
it  as  the  maintenance  of  self-identity.  But  perhaps 
this  may  not  be  very  enlightening.  Let  us  go  back  and  ask 
for  the  kind  of  interest  that  makes  the  demand  for  stability. 

1  The  trouble  with  Mill's  appeal  to  experience  is  that  it  is  not 
sufficiently  profound.  He  attempts  to  ground  one  of  our  deepest 
rooted  expectations  on  the  relatively  superficial  process  of  simple 
enumeration  of  instances,  whereas  its  real  root  is  teleological  and  it 
voices  the  demand  that  the  world  shall  behave  in  a  rational  and 
orderly  manner. 


chap.  ii.  NATUEE.  591 

It  is  clear  that  here  the  motive  is  not  that  of  self-preserva- 
tion or  mere  survival.  Uniformity,  in  the  sense  we  have 
conceived,  might  be  possible  without  stability.  At  least  there 
is  something  more  than  uniformity  involved  in  stability. 
The  interest  that  demands  stability  is  one  that  requires 
the  movements  of  any  system  to  proceed  not  from  a  plural- 
ity of  possibly  conflicting  centers,  but  from  some  one  center 
of  co-ordination  and  unification  from  which  and  in  relation 
to  which  the  system  shall  act  as  a  whole.  There  can  be  no 
stability  short  of  this :  which  is  tantamount  to  saying  that 
while  uniformity  involves  congruity  with  the  aims  of  a  life- 
system,  stability  involves  the  presence  of  system  in  nature  as 
an  internal  possession.  In  order  to  be  stable,  nature  must 
act  from  a  systemic  point  of  view,  and  as  we  have  seen  in 
other  connections  the  systemic  is  the  centrally  initiated  and, 
in  the  last  analysis,  the  purposive.  We  say  that  nature 
is  stable  in  so  far  as  it  behaves  as  though  its  activities 
were  self-centered  and  proceeded  from  a  unifying  purpose. 
However,  we  are  not  about  to  ascribe  purpose  to  nature. 
The  point  at  issue  here  is  somewhat  different.  It  was 
shown  that  the  notion  of  stability  excludes  caprice,  acci- 
dent and  chance.  These  proceed  from  the  presence  of  a 
plurality  of  non-coordinated  centers  of  activity  in  the  same 
medium.  Stability  involves  the  suppression  of  this  kind 
of  disorder  by  the  subordination  of  all  the  activities  to  one 
center  of  co-brdination  and  unification.  If  nature  be  a 
system  of  this  type  ( and  clearly  the  demand .  is  that  it 
shall  be),  it  follows  that  the  point  of  co-ordination  and 
unity  is  one  that  lies  beyond  and  outside  of  the  sphere  of 
the  operation  of  a  plurality  of  finite  and  possibly  conflict- 
ing human  purposes.  To  say  that  nature  exists  solely  as 
a  generalization  of  the  interaction  of  these  finite  human 
purposes  is  to  make  an  assertion  destructive  of  the  real 
stability  of  nature.  The  last  court  of  appeal,  or,  to  speak 
more  correctly,  the  unifying  and  co-ordinating  initiative 
which  is  to  ground  the  stability  of  nature  must  come  from 
some   center    within   nature    itself.     This    much   we    may 


592  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

regard  as  settled.  When  the  question  is  how  this  inner 
center  shall  be  taken  account  of  in  dealing  with  nature, 
different  answers  may  be  given.  If  our  interest  be  that  of 
science  exclusively,  this  inner  center  may  be  treated  as  a 
largely  negligible  term,  or  at  least  it  will  not  be  necessary 
to  take  it  into  direct  account  except  so  far  as  this  may  be 
involved  in  treating  nature  as  a  sphere  of  movements  that 
are  indifferent  to  human  interests  and  purposes.  This  is,  of 
course,  vital  to  the  science  of  nature,  and  it  involves,  by 
implication  at  least,  the  doctrine  that  nature  is  self-cen- 
tered. If,  however,  our  interest  be  that  of  the  metaphy- 
sician, a  different  answer  will  be  necessary.  The  stability 
of  nature  involves  the  existence  in  nature  of  a  unitary 
center  of  activity,  and  it  is  the  business  of  metaphysics  to 
investigate  this  implication  and  to  determine  its  significance 
for  a  system  of  reality.  It  will  be  a  vital  consideration  for 
metaphysics  to  determine  whether  or  not  the  existence  of 
this  internal  center  of  activity  involves  its  relation  to  pur- 
pose, since  if  it  does,  the  purpose  must  transcend  the  plane 
of  possibly  conflicting  finite  purposes  and  must  be  the  organ 
of  a  consciousness  that  is  in  a  position  to  determine  the 
whole  of  nature  from  this  inner  center  of  activity. 

We  thus  come  upon  the  question  of  the  relation  between 
nature  and  God.  How  is  nature  related  to  God?  Is  there 
any  relationship  that  is  open  to  determination,  and  if  so 
how  is  it  to  be  conceived?  Is  nature  a  pure  mechanism 
cut  off  from  the  influence  of  conscious  purpose;  or  if  not, 
how  is  it  related  to  that  purpose?  Is  the  purpose  tran- 
scendent, acting  upon  it  in  a  co-ordinative,  regulative  way, 
or  is  it  internal  and  is  there  a  sense  in  which  nature  itself 
is  purposive?  Now  it  is  in  dealing  with  this  question  of 
the  relation  of  nature  to  purpose  that  we  are  brought  into 
relation  with  the  great  doctrine  of  naturalism.  Here  at 
the  outset  it  will  be  necessary  to  define  our  terms  in  order 
to  avoid  possible  misunderstanding.  There  are  several 
kinds  of  naturalism.  One  of  these  represents  simply  the 
demand  of  science  to  be  allowed  to  confine  itself  to  natural 


chap.  ii.  NATUEE.  593 

and  mechanical  forces  and  agents  in  its  explanations,  and 
with  this  we  have  no  concern  here.  If,  however,  we  under- 
stand by  naturalism  not  a  name  for  scientific  method,  but 
rather  a  theory  of  the  meaning  of  nature,  it  may  take  one  of 
two  distinct  and  very  different  forms.  In  the  first  place, 
naturalism  may  ally  itself  with  materialism,  in  which  case 
it  will  involve  the  elimination  of  mind  and  purpose  from 
the  universe,  and  consequently  from  nature.  I  mean  by 
this  that  mind  and  purpose  will  be  regarded  not  as  primary 
forms  of  reality  or  as  real  causes  in  any  true  sense,  but 
simply  as  phenomena  or  accompanying  effects  of  forces  and 
agencies  that  are  purely  material.  Nature  thus  conceived 
becomes  a  system  of  purely  material  forces  acting  in  a 
strictly  mechanical  way  toward  the  production  of  results 
that  are  not  foreseen  or  predetermined  in  any  other  sense 
than  as  the  necessary  out-working  of  a  non-intelligent  ma- 
terial system.  Now  the  spirit  of  the  time  is  so  unfriendly  to 
this  species  of  naturalism,  working  out  as  it  does  into  pure 
atheism,  and  there  are  so  few  professed  materialists  or 
atheists  in  the  world,  that  it  might  seem  futile  to  give  it 
much  attention  here.  The  real  reason  for  passing  it  over 
here,  however,  is  the  fact  that  the  whole  view  of  the  world 
which  we  have  been  at  pains  to  unfold  in  these  discussions 
is  directly  opposed  to  this  form  of  naturalism  and  may  be 
regarded  as  its  criticism  if  not  its  refutation.  The  other 
form  of  naturalism  is  one  that  repudiates  materialism  and 
identifies  itself  with  some  sort  of  living  principle  which  it 
plants  at  the  heart  of  nature  and  represents  as  the  spring 
of  nature's  processes  and  movements.  This  form  of 
naturalism  ordinarily  identifies  itself  with  evolution  and 
its  ideal  of  nature  may  be  represented  as  that  of  a  self- 
developing  system  which  contains  within  itself  all  the  condi- 
tions  and  forces  of   its   evolution.1     It   is  clear  that   we 

1  Professor   Ernest  Haeckel   is   an  enthusiastic  naturalist  of  this 
type.     In    his    little    work    entitled    The    Philosophy    of    Science    he 
develops   a  species  of  naturalistic  pantheism  which  might  be  char- 
acterized as  Spinozism  turned  inside  out. 
38 


594  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

have  here  a  much  more  powerful  conception  and  one  that 
breathes  the  very  spirit  of  the  times. 

Now  it  is  not  the  purpose  here  to  enter  on  any  formal 
criticism  of  this  theory  with  a  view  to  its  refutation  or 
otherwise,  but  rather  to  submit  it  to  a  reflection  that  will 
bring  out  certain  respects  in  which  we  think  it  requires 
modification.  At  the  outset  let  it  be  said  that  the  stand- 
point here  occupied  is  that  of  evolution.  We  believe 
that  nature  is  a  system  which  reaches  its  results  through  a 
process  of  development.  And  we  believe  that  the  condi- 
tions of  the  outcome  of  any  part  of  the  movement  will  be 
contained  in  the  stages  that  precede  it.  "Why,  then,  do 
you  longer  find  fault?"  some  critic  may  ask.  Well,  the 
motive  of  it  is  not  a  captious  spirit  but  rather  a  desire  to 
find  a  theory  that  will  be  metaphysically  adequate.  If  we 
take  the  conception  of  nature  as  a  self-developing  system, 
it  is  open  to  us  to  ask  whether  the  form  of  its  movements  be 
teleological  or  purely  mechanical,  and  if  we  say  teleological, 
whether  these  movements  proceed  blindly  or  with  foresight 
and  intention.  Let  us  take  the  first  part  of  this  issue,— that 
between  the  mechanical  and  the  teleological.  If  we  say  that 
the  movement  is  purely  mechanical,  what  are  the  implica- 
tions of  our  statement  ?  The  mechanical  is  inconsistent  with 
the  notion  of  internally-acting  agency.  It  presupposes  ex- 
ternally-initiated movement  and  externally-acting  agency. 
Mechanism  must  be  constantly  replenished  from  some  ultra- 
mechanical  spring  or  it  will  run  down.  But  this  type  of 
naturalism  conceives  nature  to  be  a  self-developing  system. 
Plainly,  then,  the  notion  of  a  mechanical  system  must  be 
given  up  and  that  of  teleology  or  quasi-teleology  must  be 
substituted.  This  will  follow  unless  some  middle  ground 
short  of  teleology  be  found  on  which  the  theory  can 
rest.  Now,  teleology  implies  directed  movement  and 
directed  movement  is  movement  toward  a  goal.  Let  us 
conceive  a  system,  however,  that  contains  the  spring  of  its 
own  movements  but  supplies  no  directive  agency.  Will 
not  nature  be  possible  on  this  basis  as  a  system  of  per  en- 


chap.  ii.  NATUEE.  595 

nially  replenished  energies  which  work  out  their  results 
through  their  interaction  with  one  another?  It  is  possible 
to  conceive  such  a  system  if  we  could  find  the  notion  of  the 
spring  itself  manageable.  We  have  seen  in  the  course 
of  our  investigation  in  the  second  part  of  this  treatise, 
that  such  a  conception  as  this  is  the  immediate  implication 
of  the  inorganic  stage  of  world  manifestation.  Were 
nature  then  a  mere  matter  of  physics  and  chemistry,  it 
would  seem  that  we  could  be  perfectly  sure  of  no  other 
metaphysical  ground  than  this  spring  of  non-directive 
energy.  Even  then,  however,  we  should  find  the  concep- 
tion unsatisfactory  and  lacking  in  finality  and  we  should  be 
pressed  to  the  further  analysis  of  spontaneity  in  order  to 
discover  in  it  some  clue  to  the  definite  trends  which  we  find 
in  nature.  The  physical  investigator  usually  blinds  himself 
to  this  issue  by  assuming  as  his  data,  matter  and  its  laws, 
meaning  by  the  latter  certain  primary  tendencies,  not 
realizing  the  fact  that  it  is  just  these  primary  tendencies 
which  supply  the  whole  problem  here.  If  our  spring  of 
spontaneity  really  acted  in  a  perfectly  unintelligible  and 
aimless  way  there  would  be  no  further  question.  But  back 
of  that  system  of  results  which  arise  out  of  the  interactions 
of  the  elements,  is  a  sphere  where  results  are  predetermined 
by  the  original  character  of  the  forces  that  enter  into  the 
interplay.  The  physicist  provides  for  these  by  his  con- 
ception of  the  world  as  a  system  of  activities  the  unitary 
source  of  which  is  found  in  a  spring  of  spontaneous  energy. 
This  brings  us  back  to  the  critique  of  the  notion  of  spon- 
taneity itself  and  we  find,  on  analysis,  that  it  accounts  for 
initiation  but  not  for  selection  or  direction.  In  order, 
then,  to  rationalize  the  world  completely  we  must  postulate 
some  hidden  nature  in  this  spring  which,  to  some  extent  at 
least,  predetermines  the  course  of  its  movements. 

Now  we  are  strengthened  in  the  conclusion  arrived  at 
here  by  the  vision  that  meets  us  when  we  contemplate 
the  organic  world.  We  have  there  the  manifestation 
of   open   selection   and  end-seeking   and   in   a   form   that 


596  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

the  action  of  the  environment  cannot  altogether  explain. 
For  if  Ave  deduct  from  the  total  result  everything  that 
may  be  ascribed  to  the  interplay  between  the  life  organ 
and  the  forces  to  which  it  reacts,  we  shall  find  a  residue 
of  selective  and  directive  character  which  we  can  do 
naught  else  than  ascribe  to  the  qualities  of  the  original 
cells  which  constitute  the  units  of  living  tissue.  The 
biological  philosopher,  like  the  physicist,  is  likely  to  blind 
himself  at  this  point  by  the  supposition  that  this  reference 
to  the  original  character  of  the  life-cell  is  really  explana- 
tory, whereas  in  fact  it  is  only  a  careful  statement  of  the 
problem  itself.  What  is  the  metaphysical  interpretation 
of  the  fact  that  the  world  openly  manifests  selective  and 
directive  energy  ?  Is  it  not  that  this  has  been  at  the  world 's 
heart  from  the  beginning  and  here  for  the  first  time  re- 
veals itself  openly?  Plainly,  if  we  include  in  our  con- 
ception of  nature  the  sphere  of  life-activity  as  well  as  that 
of  the  non-living  (and  the  world  would  else  be  a  mere 
torso),  we  shall  have  on  our  hands  a  nature  that  yields  us 
not  only  mechanical  results  produced  by  movements  that 
are  explicable  in  terms  of  the  interactions  of  blind  and 
insensate  forces,  but  also  movements  which  take  on  the  form 
of  selectiveness  and  end-seeking  and  are,  therefore,  openly 
teleological. 

The  conclusion  to  be  drawn  here  is  that  nature  can- 
not be  denied  a  teleological  character.  This  character 
is  stamped  on  the  form  of  the  life-movements,  and 
the  metaphysical  issue  regarding  it  is  whether  the 
whole  is  simply  an  accidental  outcome  of  blind  and  in- 
sensate forces,  or  whether,  on  the  contrary,  it  is  meant  by 
the  very  heart  of  the  world.  If  we  take  the  former  alter- 
native, the  whole  living  sphere  loses  its  reality  and  becomes 
a  mere  pendant,  a  mere  epi-phenomenon,  of  the  inorganic 
and  the  world  in  its  passage  from  the  non-living  to  the 
living  and  up  to  the  sphere  of  consciousness  and  its  higher 
manifestations,  is  only  travelling  further  and  deeper  into 
the  valley  of  illusion.     It  is  becoming  less  and  less  real  and 


chap.  ii.  NATUKE.  597 

at  length  threatens  to  vanish  into  the  baseless  fabric  of  a 
vision.  This  is  not  an  argument,  however,  but  rather  a 
monition  that  here  we  have  come  upon  that  fundamental 
line  of  cleavage  which  divides  reason  from  its  opposite.  It 
is  possible  that  the  world  may  be  irrational  and  absurd  at  its 
heart  and  that  the  process  by  which  it  realizes  itself  in 
outward  manifestation  may  be  one  of  progressive  illusion. 
But  such  a  world  is  one  in  which  neither  science  nor  phi- 
losophy could  live.  The  other  alternative  then,  which 
locates  meaning  at  the  heart  of  the  world,  is,  broadly  con- 
ceived, the  alternative  of  reason  versus  unreason.  For, 
nature  is  either  a  system  of  results  that  have  their  rationale 
in  the  inner  source  of  all  its  activities,  or  else  it  has  no 
rationale  and  its  results  are  the  accidental  outcome  of 
blind  and  fatalistic  forces.  There  is,  in  the  last  analysis, 
no  middle  ground  and  the  issue  is  one  between  rationality 
and  its  opposite. 

It  would  seem,  then,  that  the  representation  of  nature 
as  a  self-developing  system  that  contains  within  it  a  spring 
of  initiative  to  which  we  apply  the  name  spontaneity,  how- 
ever well  it  may  serve  the  purposes  of  science  (and  there  is 
no  disposition  to  quibble  on  this  point),  is  unable  to  satisfy 
the  requirements  of  sound  metaphysical  theory.  Nature 
is  either  something  less  than  that  and  different  in  consti- 
tution ;  or  it  is  something  more  and  we  must  go  on  from 
the  notion  of  mere  spontaneous  initiative  to  more  adequate 
conceptions.  Now  the  theme  of  this  section  is  nature  and 
God  and  if  we  identify  God  with  the  metaphysical  ground  or 
first  principle  of  the  world,  it  is  open  to  us  here  to  consider 
what  may  be  the  relation  of  nature  to  God.  We  have 
found  that  the  very  concept  of  nature  involves  its  relation 
to  a  spring  of  spontaneous  energy.  And  we  have  seen  that, 
when  metaphysically  interpreted,  this  spring  of  spon- 
taneity becomes  identical  with  God.  What,  then,  is  the 
relation  of  nature  to  God?  Is  God  related  to  nature  as  its 
soul,  and  are  we  to  conceive  the  divine  in  nature  under  the 
analogy  of  a  world-soul?     We  cannot  speak  dogmatically, 


598  DEDUCTIONS.  paet  in. 

since  our  acquaintance  with  the  situation  is  not  rich  enough 
in  first-hand  knowledge.  But  we  are  sure  of  this,  that  just 
as  the  world  of  our  striving  is  related  to  our  energies  pri- 
marily through  the  purposes  which  stimulate  and  direct 
them,  so  proceeding  in  the  light  of  this  analogy  to  interpret 
implications  which  arise  necessarily  out  of  the  nature  of  the 
case  we  are  led  to  relate  nature  directly  to  the  purposive 
agency  of  the  divine  energy  which  it  involves  and  to  say 
that  nature  exists  and  moves  on  to  the  completion  of  its 
processes  in  accordance  with,  and  as  the  working  out  of,  a 
purpose  in  which  it  is  as  a  whole  included.  In  the  light  of 
this  conclusion  we  are  able  to  see  how  that  which,  in  its 
outer  form,  and  also  from  the  point  of  view  of  its  inner 
spontaneous  initiative,  may  be  truly  regarded  as  mechan- 
ical, will,  when  referred  to  the  deeper  divine  purpose, 
become  intentional  and  teleological.  This  much  we  can 
determine,  leaving  the  question  whether  God's  relation  to 
nature  shall  be  construed  under  the  analogy  of  a  world-soul 
to  be  determined  by  the  conclusion  we  shall  be  led  to 
ultimately  as  to  God's  relation  to  the  whole  sphere  of 
reality. 

From  nature  and  God  the  passage  is  natural  to  the 
theme  of  nature  and  evolution.  We  ask  here,  How  does 
the  doctrine  of  evolution  affect  the  conception  of  nature? 
and  as  a  corollary  to  this,  How  does  it  affect  our  conception 
of  the  relation  of  nature  to  God?  That  the  modern  doc- 
trine of  evolution  has  profoundly  influenced  our  concep- 
tions of  nature  no  one  can  deny.  It  is  to  evolution  mainly 
that  we  are  indebted  for  the  completion  of  the  notion  of 
nature  as  a  self-developing  system  containing  the  spring 
of  initiative  within  itself.  The  doctrine  of  evolution 
defines  this  conception  by  reading  it  into  the  time-series 
and  developing  the  conditions  and  stages  of  a  progressive 
emergence  of  things  into  complexity  and  definite  form. 
We  may  say  that  evolution  is  simply  the  notion  of  the 
self-developing  system  carried  out  in  detail  and  exhibited 
in  the  progressive  stages  by  which  the  infinite  complexity 


chap.  ii.  NATUKE.  599 

of  the  world  is  realized.  Taking  it  in  its  vastness,  evolution 
gives  us  the  vision  of  the  cosmos  evolving  itself  into  inor- 
ganic and  organic  forms  and  passing  through  the  open 
door  of  consciousness  into  the  field  of  higher  phenomena; 
while  taking  it  in  its  details,  it  initiates  us  into  the  labora- 
tory in  which  the  specializng  forces  of  nature  are  inces- 
santly fabricating  its  forms.  The  revelation  as  a  whole  is 
that  of  a  mighty  agent  which  exercises  infinite  patience  and 
consumes  aeons  of  time  in  attaining  its  results,  while  on 
the  other  hand  it  does  not  tire  of  infinite  detail  but  con- 
siders the  minutest  changes  or  modifications  as  not  beneath 
its  notice.  Nature  as  it  proceeds  under  the  rubrics  of 
evolution  presents  itself  as  a  worker  of  inexhaustible 
patience  and  a  mistress  of  infinite  detail. 

But  while  thus  magnifying  nature's  function  from 
one  point  of  view,  evolution  tends  to  minimize  it  from 
another.  In  its  immediate  bearings  at  least,  evolution 
is  a  breaker  up  of  unities  and  a  resolver  into  details. 
It  is  not  hospitable  to  the  notion  of  a  general  relation 
of  nature  to  its  results,  especially  if  this  relation  tends 
to  be  construed  as  teleological.  Even  less  hospitable 
is  it  to  the  notion  of  special  creations,— special  inter- 
ferences of  teleological  motives  in  the  chain  of  mechan- 
ical agencies.  Evolution  leads  its  votary  everywhere 
to  seek  for  the  natural  causes  of  any  change  of  form 
or  movement,  in  the  immediate  conditions  which  con- 
stitute its  antecedent,  and  in  this  it  seems  to  be,  and 
rightfully  is,  from  this  point  of  view,  a  great  destroyer 
of  teleologies.  If  the  question  be  put,  however,  whether 
evolution  is  to  be  regarded  as  hostile  to  the  notion  of 
teleology,  the  issue  raised  leads  to  an  important  dis- 
tinction. Evolution  as  we  have  been  regarding  it,  is  a 
mechanical  principle,  and  as  such  is  hostile  to  any  teleology 
of  the  interfering  species.  I  mean  by  this  a  teleology  which 
is  conceived  as  acting  on  the  same  plane  with  the  mechanical 
forces  and  as  injecting  itself  in  such  a  way  as  to  modify  the 
operation  of  the  mechanical  forces.     There  is,  however,  a 


600  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

kind  of  teleology  with  which  mechanism  has  no  quarrel,— 
a  teleology  that  does  not  work  on  the  same  plane  with 
the  mechanical  forces,  but  grounds  and  conditions  them. 
Thus,  if  we  speak  of  the  mechanism  of  the  world,  we  mean 
the  plexus  of  agencies  which  operate  in  the  time-series  to 
the  immediate  production  of  outer  movements  or  results. 
If,  however,  the  world  have  an  inner  as  well  as  an  outer 
meaning,  and  if  we  relate  the  outer  movements  of  the  world 
to  an  inner  spring  of  initiative,  we  have  seen  how,  meta- 
physically, we  are  led  to  translate  this  inner  into  terms  of 
selectiveness  and  purpose.  The  purpose  thus  becomes  the 
grounding  and  unifying  principle  of  the  outer  mechanical 
forces  and  movements.  Now,  against  this  kind  of  teleology 
evolution  has  nothing  to  say,  for  it  leaves  the  field  open  to 
the  unrestricted  play  of  natural  causes  and  mechanical 
agencies  while  at  the  same  time  it  holds  the  whole,  and  in 
it  each  and  every  detail,  in  the  clutches  of  a  teleological 
principle.  In  truth,  if  we  view  the  world  from  the  plane 
here  indicated  we  find  that  evolution  itself  presents  the  form 
of  teleology.  It  is  formally  an  end-realizing  process  and  there 
is  no  other  rationale  in  the  process  from  the  beginning  than 
the  end  toward  which  it  is  moving.  The  doctrine  of  evolu- 
tion does  transform  our  conception  of  nature  and  it  does 
eliminate  a  great  many  kinds  of  teleologies,  but  it  does  not 
shake  the  relation  of  God  to  the  world  when  that  relation  is 
rationally  conceived ;  rather,  it  commends  itself  as  the  most 
rational  conception  of  God's  way  of  realizing  his  purposes. 
The  question  of  nature  and  man  resolves  itself  sub- 
stantially into  that  of  man's  relation  to  the  process  of 
natural  evolution.  AYe  do  not  here  propose  to  deal  with 
the  question  piecemeal  or  to  adopt  the  makeshift  of  at- 
tempting to  propitiate  the  monster  we  call  evolution  by 
offering  him  man's  body  on  condition  that  he  execute  a 
quit-claim  in  respect  to  man's  mind.  It  is  not  difficult  at 
this  day  for  the  biologist  to  show  that  the  physical  organism 
of  man  has  been  subject  to  the  evolution-process.  And  the 
genetic    psychologist   supplies    almost   equally   ample    evi- 


chap.  ii.  NATTJEE.  601 

dence  that  man's  mind  is  not  a  fixed  quantity,  but  has 
experienced  a  growth  under  conditions  that  are  largely 
ascertainable.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  it  has  become 
necessary  to  adopt  a  fluent  conception  of  man  both  as 
respects  his  body  and  his  mind.  Leaving  questions  of 
detail  then,  what  can  we  say  of  the  relation  of  man  as  a 
whole,  that  is,  as  an  organism  including  both  body  and 
mind,  to  the  process  of  natural  evolution?  In  order  to 
answer  intelligently  we  must  return  to  the  discussion  of  the 
last  paragraph  in  which  it  was  concluded  that  evolution  it- 
self is  not  absolute  and  self-determined,  but  that  as  a  proc- 
ess it  involves  implications  which,  when  developed,  bind  it 
fast  to  purpose  and  make  it  divinely  determined.  The  ques- 
tion we  have  to  ask  here  is,  How  are  we  to  conceive  the  rela- 
tion of  man  to  the  process  of  evolution  when  thus  conditioned 
by  the  divine  purpose?  Let  us  consider  it  first,  however, 
in  relation  to  a  natural  process  conceived  apart  from  the 
divine  purpose,  and  as  self-determined.  The  theory  that  man 
is  a  pure  product  of  such  a  process  takes  its  place  as  a  phase 
of  that  naturalism  which  we  have  been  examining.  Let 
us  suppose  man  to  be  resolvable  into  a  developing  series 
in  time  and  that  each  member  of  the  chain  arises  out  of 
antecedents  also  included  in  the  series.  Here  the  problem 
becomes  a  special  form  of  the  general  question  as  to 
whether  evolution  can  be  regarded  as  absolute  and  self- 
determined.  Now  we  saw  in  dealing  with  the  general 
question  that  this  cannot  be  the  case  but  that  evolution 
involves  an  internal  spring  of  initiative,  and  that  this, 
when  submitted  to  analysis,  does  not  prove  to  be  an  ulti- 
mate conception  but  involves  some  internal  principle  of 
selectiveness  and  intention  which  leads  to  the  grounding 
of  evolution  in  purpose.  The  question  regarding  man 
involves  a  special  form  of  this  implication.  Man  as  an 
organized  body  informed  with  mind  or  consciousness  is 
a  being  in  whom  the  selectiveness  and  end-seeking  charac- 
teristics of  life  have  taken  on  a  higher  form.  They  have 
become  explicit,  or  are  on  the  way  to  become  so,  and  supply 


602  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

an  example  of  a  consciously  determined  organism,  and 
since  all  consciousness  is  teleological,  as  James  has  taught 
us,  we  have  in  man  an  example  of  an  organism  the  form  of 
whose  activity  is  consciously  teleological.  The  question  is, 
how  could  this  form  of  consciously  determined  activity 
arise  out  of  conditions  purely  mechanical  and  determined 
by  natural  causation?  Or  to  give  the  full  advantage 
to  naturalism,  how  could  action  that  is  consciously  se- 
lective and  end-seeking  arise  out  of  a  spring  of  initiative 
that  is  lacking  in  these  qualities?  Of  course,  it  may 
be  said  that  these  are  potentially  in  the  spring,  but 
Aristotle  has  taught  us  that  potency  is  not  an  ultimate 
term  but  presupposes  actuality,  so  that  a  world  which 
evolves  conscious  selectiveness  and  end-seeking  in  its  mani- 
festation must  be  consciously  selective  and  end-determining 
at  its  heart.  This  is  the  invincible  logic  by  which  natural- 
ism in  general  is  proved  to  be  inadequate,  and  its  force  is 
not  abated  when  the  naturalistic  claim  is  made  respecting 
man.  Let  it  be  admitted  that  man  is  a  product  of  evolu- 
tion. This  evolution  itself  when  called  into  court  can 
assert  no  divine  prerogative,  but  is  forced  to  admit  that  in 
order  to  be  rational  at  all  it  must  be  grounded  in  the 
divine  purpose. 

This  brings  us  back  to  the  main  question:  the  relation 
we  are  to  conceive  as  existing  between  man  and  a  divinely 
determined  process  of  evolution.  Is  there  any  meta- 
physical reason  why  we  should  not  adopt  in  full  the  evolu- 
tion standpoint  regarding  man's  relation  to  nature?  There 
is  none  so  long  as  we  conceive  evolution  itself  as  requiring 
grounding  in  divine  purpose.  The  hesitancy  we  feel  is 
rather  religious  than  metaphysical.  What  about  our 
bibles?  And  then  there  is  the  miracle.  What  are  you 
going  to  do  with  that  in  a  world  where  everything  is 
gradually  evolved?  Well,  so  far  as  our  bibles  are  con- 
cerned the  vital  point  about  them  is  not  how  they  were 
made  but  what  they  contain.  If  evolution  be  divinely 
conditioned,   then   God  can   give  a  revelation   of  himself 


chap.  ii.  NATUEE.  g03 

through  its  channels  and  this  revelation  may  be  summed 
up  in  a  history  and  a  book.  In  the  last  analysis  the  only 
guarantee  of  the  truth  is  the  truth  itself,  and  if  there  be  a 
true  revelation  of  God  in  our  bibles  we  may  be  sure  that 
they  will  not  perish  or  lose  their  commanding  power  over 
the  hearts  of  men.  As  to  the  miracle,  in  any  case  where  it 
is  real  it  is  either  intended  in  the  divine  purpose  or  it  is 
not.  If  not,  then  it  has  no  religious  significance.  If,  how- 
ever, it  be  intended  in  the  divine  purpose,  it  then  has  a 
place  in  the  divine  world-scheme  which  evolution  itself  is 
working  out.  How  could  a  genuine  miracle  contradict 
evolution  unless  we  conceive  evolution  as  being  absolute  ?  It 
is  not  evolution  but  the  form  of  naturalism  we  have  been 
criticising,  that  is  inconsistent  with  any  genuine  divine 
happenings.  If  our  world  be  metaphysically  grounded  in 
a  divine  purpose,  then  our  bibles  and  our  miracles  so  far 
as  they  are  genuine  will  take  care  of  themselves  and  our 
religious  scruples  may  be  laid  to  rest.  It  will  never  be  con- 
ceivable that  any  form  of  divine  manifestation  can  be 
inconsistent  with  a  world-process  that  is  divinely  grounded. 


CHAPTER  III 


IDEA  OF  GOD. 


In  the  discussion  of  the  Ultra-Social  World  of  Religion  in 
the  second  part,  we  pointed  out  in  some  detail  the  way  in 
which  the  recognition  of  a  being,  whom  we  call  the  tran- 
scendent Other,  is  involved  in  the  religious  consciousness 
from  the  outset  and  how  the  history  of  religion  is  but  a 
record  of  the  evolution  of  that  being  into  clearer  and  more 
conscious  terms.  The  argument  of  those  chapters  we  shall 
not  repeat  here,  but  shall  go  on  to  consider  the  idea  of  God 
briefly  as  to  its  origin  and  development.  But  our  main 
concern  here  will  be  rather  with  the  metaphysical  sig- 
nificance of  the  idea  of  God  and  with  the  relation  of  God 
to  nature  and  to  the  life  of  man.  The  question  of  the 
origin  of  the  idea  of  God  may  be  either  a  genetic  one  of 
evolution  and  history  or  it  may  be  the  more  logical  problem 
of  the  grounds  in  experience  out  of  which  the  idea  of  God 
normally  and  in  fact  necessarily  arises.  We  have  already 
dealt  with  the  genetic  and  historic  problems  and  the  latter 
supplies  the  form  in  which  the  question  will  be  considered 
here.  Again,  taking  this  form  of  the  question,  it  may  be 
considered  in  its  general  bearings  in  view  of  the  whole  of 
experience  or  in  special  connection  with  the  religious  con- 
sciousness. AVe  propose  here  to  treat  the  problem  first  in 
its  general  and  secondly  in  its  more  special  bearings. 
How,  then,  is'  the  idea  of  God  related  to  the  general  expe- 
rience of  man  ?     Are  there  any  data  outside  of  the  religious 

604 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  605 

consciousness  that  lead  up  to  the  conception  of  God? 
Bear  in  mind  we  do  not  say  that  any  such  data  will  be 
adequate  to  the  full  development  of  that  idea.  We  only 
ask  whether  general  experience  looks  in  the  direction  of 
this  idea,  or,  on  the  contrary,  away  from  it.  That  it  looks 
in  the  direction  of  it  will  be  admitted  by  any  one,  we  think, 
who  does  not  cut  experience  off  from  its  metaphysical 
implications.  Taking  experience  in  general,  either  in  its 
objective  or  its  subjective  aspects,  we  shall  find  that  a 
point  is  certain  to  be  reached  where  a  distinction  arises 
between  the  finite  and  relative,  and  an  implied  infinite 
and  absolute,  in  which  it  is  completed  and  grounded. 
We  have  seen  that  man  only  requires  to  follow  out  his 
objective  processes  far  enough  in  order  to  arrive  at  a  point 
where  his  finite  powers  reach  the  end  of  their  initiative 
and  lapse  into  subordination  to  some  agency  that  tran- 
scends and  comprehends  them.  This  is  the  lesson  of  the 
whole  second  part  of  our  investigation.  Starting  with  the 
nearest  data  of  experience,  we  have  seen  that  following  the 
course  of  the  sciences  down  to  their  most  fundamental 
concepts  we  find  in  these,  implications  which  connect  them 
with  some  metaphysical  ground.  And  the  investigation  of 
this  metaphysical  ground  resolves  it  into  a  teleological 
principle  which  roots  the  world  in  intelligence  and  purpose. 
Entering  the  field  of  consciousness  and  passing  out  into  the 
world  of  social  activities,  we  find  that  the  metaphysical 
implication  becomes  clearer  and  that  we  are  approaching 
nearer  to  the  notion  of  a  being  analogous  to  the  self  we 
know,  only  transcending  our  finite  molds,  in  the  thought 
and  purpose  of  which  the  world  finds  its  rational  ground. 
It  makes  no  difference  what  region  in  experience  we  set  out 
from,  it  will  lead  up  to  the  point  where  we  become  con- 
scious of  its  metaphysical  implication.  Now  it  is  because 
our  experience  is  of  this  character,— an  experience  that 
nowhere  allows  us  to  stop  and  say  with  the  storied  Indian 
"Alabama,  here  I  rest,"— that  we  find  it  everywhere  relat- 
ing  itself  to   some   principle   of   metaphysical   grounding. 


606  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

We  call  this  demand  for  metaphysical  grounding  a  datum 
for  the  formation  of  the  idea  of  God  because  it  everywhere 
leads  toward  a  spiritualistic  conception  of  the  world.  In 
cosmology  we  find  data  for  relating  the  world  to  intelli- 
gence and  purpose,  while  in  metaphysical-psychology  we 
discover  further  data  which  lead  us  to  the  reference  of  this 
intelligence  and  purpose  to  a  being  analogous  to  self. 
Without  special  regard  to  the  religious  consciousness,  then, 
it  can  be  shown  that  the  general  trend  of  our  experience 
is  toward  the  formation  of  an  idea  of  a  being  in  whose 
thought  and  purpose  the  world  is  grounded.  But  we  have 
already  learned  that  it  is  only  in  the  religious  consciousness 
that  we  become  directly  aware  of  the  presence,  in  the  field 
of  our  activities  and  related  to  ourselves,  of  a  being  who  is 
not  only  our  other  and  not  ourself,  but  a  being  who 
transcends  us  and  to  whom  we  ascribe  ultra-human  at- 
tributes. That  this  consciousness  is  crude  at  first  we 
admit,  but  in  its  crudest  and  most  undeveloped  form  it 
contains  the  germ  of  the  distinction  on  which  every  form 
of  religious  experience  rests.  It  is  in  the  religious  con- 
sciousness that  the  idea  to  which  all  experience  approxi- 
mates becomes  clearly  the  idea  of  God.  It  may  safely  be 
said,  then,  that  the  idea  of  God  is  a  distinctive  product  of 
the  religious  consciousness,  and  we  may  go  so  far  even  as  to 
claim  that  normally  the  religious  consciousness  develops 
its  idea  of  God  without  special  or  conscious  reference  to  the 
metaphysical  trend  of  general  experience.  Hence  it  is 
that  we  find  the  idea  of  God  which  develops  in  the  relig- 
ions of  the  world,  to  a  great  degree  independent  of  the 
idea  as  it  develops  in  philosophy.  This  independence 
would  be  more  complete  in  the  earlier  stages  of  its  history, 
while  in  the  later  stages  the  tendency  of  religion  to  be- 
come reflective  would  lead  to  the  coalescence  of  the  two 
movements  and  the  attempt  to  unify  them  in  one  concep- 
tion. In  dealing  with  theism,  for  example,  we  find  it 
necessary  to  distinguish  between  the  conception  of  God 
that  has  grown  up  exclusively  in  religion,  and  what  we 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  607 

may  call  philosophical  theism  whose  problem  is  that  of  the 
identification  of  the  absolute  or  world-ground  of  phil- 
osophy with  the  God  of  the  religious  consciousness. 

While,  then,  the  idea  of  God  may  originate  and  grow 
up,  in  a  sense,  as  an  independent  possession  of  the  re- 
ligious consciousness,  it  is  safe  to  say  that  it  loses  that 
isolation  just  as  soon  as  any  general  movement  of  re- 
flection arises  among  men.  When  reflection  arises  phi- 
losophy is  born,  and  philosophy  looks  not  only  to  the 
grounding  of  things  but  to  their  unification.  Just  so 
soon  as  a  thinker,  like  Anaxagoras,  arises  and  propounds 
the  theory  of  intelligence  or  reason  as  the  first  prin- 
ciple of  the  world,  the  conditions  of  the  correlation 
will  be  present.  And  the  end  will  be  worked  towards 
from  both  sides.  For  on  the  one  hand  religion  itself 
will  become  speculative  and  it  will  be  seen  that  the 
God  of  religion  must  also,  in  order  to  maintain  his 
place,  be  identified  with  the  ground  of  the  world.  He 
must  be  that  absolute  first  principle  to  whose  thought 
and  purpose  the  whole  world  is  to  be  referred.  The  idea 
of  God  in  religion  will  thus  tend  to  become  more  philoso- 
phical. On  the  other  hand,  philosophical  reflection,  in  its 
efforts  to  reach  an  intelligible  conception  of  the  first  prin- 
ciple which  it  postulates,  will  be  likely  to  find  a  norm  of 
such  conception  in  the  religious  idea  of  God.  In  spite 
of  its  hatred  of  anthropomorphism,  which  is  constitutional, 
it  will  not  fail  to  see  that  at  the  heart  of  the  religious  con- 
ception there  is  a  very  profound  use  of  the  analogy  of  self- 
hood. Taking  the  hint,  philosophical  reflection  will  develop 
a  critical  conception  and  use  of  this  analogy  and  will  find  a 
rational  employment  for  it  in  the  reduction  of  its  own  first 
principle  to  a  more  definite  conception.  The  absolute  will 
now  no  longer  be  a  mere  principle  of  thought  and  pur- 
pose; it  will  begin  to  assume  the  lineaments  of  a  being, 
a  self  however  vaguely  conceived,  which  becomes  the  bearer 
and  organ  of  that  intelligence  and  purpose  in  which  the 
world  is  grounded.     There  will  thus  be  an  approach  to  a 


608  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

common  ideal  until,  at  the  point  where  religion  becomes 
truly  philosophical  and  philosophy  truly  religious,  they 
will  coalesce  into  one.  This  is  only  to  say  that  in  a  con- 
sciousness whose  organs  of  reflection  and  religion  have 
coalesced  into  one,  a  conception  of  God  will  be  born  which 
will  tend  to  satisfy  the  requirements  of  both  philosophy 
and  religion. 

The  idea  of  God  which  thus  emerges  is  one  that  will 
have  back  of  it  the  motives  of  both  general  and  special  ex- 
perience. For  philosophy  is  the  organ  of  the  general  ex- 
perience and  formulates  its  demand  in  the  reflective  con- 
ception of  God;  whereas  the  special  organ  which  we  call 
the  religious  consciousness  develops  the  religious  idea  of 
God.  When  the  two  organs  coalesce  into  one  this  may 
well  be  said  to  voice  the  whole  of  experience,  and  when 
this  demand  leads  to  the  formation  of  an  idea  of  God  that 
promises  to  satisfy  the  requirements  of  both  philosophy 
and  religion,  it  may  well  be  claimed  that  it  represents 
a  necessary  requirement  of  the  whole  of  our  experience. 
We  put  a  question  of  even  greater  moment  when  we 
ask  for  the  metaphysical  meaning  of  the  idea  of  God. 
The  technical  question  of  existence  does  not  come  into 
this  discussion,  but  the  vital  issues  are  those  of  essen- 
tial nature  and  reality.  Now  the  question  of  essential 
nature  is  one  that  involves  both  the  type  and  funda- 
mental attributes  of  the  being  we  call  God.  The  most 
fundamental  question  of  all  is,  of  course,  that  of  the 
type  of  being  after  which  or  upon  which  the  idea  of  God  is 
to  be  formed.  This  type  is  one  that  involves  two  elements ; 
(1)  an  intelligible  norm,  and  (2)  what  we  may  designate 
as  the  application  to  it  of  a  principle  of  transcendence.  The 
intelligible  norm  of  all  being  in  its  inner  constitution  is 
found  in  our  own  experience  of  selfhood.  Unconsciously 
we  use  the  analogy  of  selfhood  in  forming  the  conception 
even  of  inanimate  things.  If  these  things  are  regarded 
;is  individuals  in  any  sense,  we  conceive  them,  as  such,  to 
have  some  inner  center  of  being  or  activity  to  which  all 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  609 

their  plurality  of  motions  and  pails  is  related.  And  we 
do  not  regard  this  simply  as  a  necessity  of  conception ;  it 
is  rather  a  necessity  of  being,  inasmuch  as  without  it  what 
is  plural  in  its  movements  could  not  possibly  be  one  in  any 
real  sense.  But  our  experience  does  not  supply  us  with 
any  other  model  of  such  being  than  the  one  we  find  in  our 
own  self-consciousness.  We  may  ask,  then,  What  would 
our  world  be  to  us  were  the  unconscious  application  to  it 
of  the  analogues  of  our  own  selfhood  eliminated  from  it? 
The  truth  is,  there  would  be  no  world  left;  there  would 
be  only  an  unorganized  mass  of  happenings  into  which  we 
should  have  no  means  of  introducing  even  the  germs  of 
order.  The  analogy  of  selfhood  is  the  principle  of  intel- 
ligibility in  general,  therefore,  in  our  relations  with  the 
world,  and  it  is  that  in  a  special  sense  in  the  determination 
of  our  idea  of  God.  The  application  here  is  more  con- 
scious, more  explicit  and  more  complete. 

Let  us  consider,  then,  what  this  analogy  supplies 
to  the  idea  of  God,  that  could  be  derived  from  no 
other  source.  Well,  to  be  brief,  it  supplies  the  whole 
framework  of  the  idea.  It  alone  makes  it  possible  to 
conceive  God  as  another  self;  a  being  of  self-centered 
conscious  activity ;  a  being  holding  in  its  consciousness 
the  elements  of  thought,  feeling  and  will;  a  being  that 
manifests  itself  in  forms  of  personality,  the  category 
that  mediates  the  manifold  expression  of  a  unitary  nature ; 
a  being  that  acts  upon  and  realizes  its  world  through 
the  medium  of  purpose;  a  being  that  conceives  its  ends, 
loves  its  ends  and  works  toward  them  in  its  volitions  and 
objective  activities.  All  this  is  involved  in  the  use  of  the 
self-analogy.  We  find  it  operating  in  a  blind,  na'ive  and 
altogether  rudimentary  way  in  the  mind  of  the  savage 
who  worships  his  fetich,  while  in  the  higher  forms  of 
religious  experience  it  is  more  developed.  In  the  highest 
and  most  rational  religions  the  use  of  the  analogy  has  be- 
come still  more  explicit  and  at  the  same  time  more  critical 
and  discriminating.  But  in  every  effort  of  the  human  con- 
39 


610  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

sciousness  to  define  in  conceivable  terms  the  nature  of  that 
being  to  which  it  stands  related,  the  self-analogy  stands 
central.  By  the  use  of  the  self-analogy  we  determine  our 
idea  of  God  as  that  of  a  self,  a  being  possessing  selfhood 
fundamentally  like  our  own  and  exercising  attributes  that 
have  their  analogues  in  our  experience.  God  stands, 
therefore,  in  an  important  sense  as  the  ideal  of  our  other 
self.  Now,  if  there  were  nothing  in  our  experience  that 
naturally  tended  to  qualify  or  check  the  use  of  the  self- 
analogy,  our  idea  of  God  would  become  that  of  a  being  on 
our  own  plane  and  altogether  like  ourselves.  Our  religion 
would  thus  become  rank  anthropomorphism.  But  our 
analysis  of  the  religions  consciousness  has  led  us  to  see  that 
the  idea  of  God  is  qualified  from  the  outset  by  the  attribute 
of  transcendence.  The  being  whom  the  religious  con- 
sciousness reveals  to  us  is  one  that  occupies  a  higher  plane 
of  being  than  we  ourselves.  And  as  our  religious  concep- 
tions develop,  this  sense  of  transcendence  unfolds  into 
terms  of  rational  apprehension  and  God  becomes  to  us  the 
absolute  and  infinite  self  which  stands  over  against  us  as  our 
religious  other.  The  specific  revelation  of  transcendence 
which  comes  to  us  in  the  religious  consciousness  finds  con- 
firmation in  general  experience,  for  we  have  already  seen 
how  every  part  of  our  experience  leads  to  a  point  where 
the  implication  of  transcendence  arises,  and  we  have  also 
seen  how  the  philosophical  idea  of  God  arises  from  the 
coalescence  of  the  special  data  of  the  religious  conscious- 
ness with  that  of  general  experience.  The  experience  of 
transcendence,  and  especially  the  conceptions  of  absolute- 
ness and  infiniteness  which  develop  out  of  it,  act  in  a  very 
profound  way  to  modify  the  whole  application  of  the  self  • 
analogy.  And  the  application  of  this  modifier  is  not 
exactly  of  the  kind  the  plain  man  would  imagine.  We 
do  not  regard  God  as  a  being  like  ourselves  up  to  a 
certain  point  and  so  far  forth  intelligible,  while  beyond 
that  point  his  nature  becomes  transcendent  and  wholly 
inaccessible.     This  is  a  mechanical  way  of  conceiving  that 


chap.  m.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  qh 

represents  a  characteristic  weakness  of  onr  time.  It  is 
altogether  irrelevant  and  futile.  If  God  be  intelligible  at 
all  he  is  intelligible  in  his  whole  nature  and  not  simply 
in  a  part  of  it.  Again,  if  God  be  transcendent  and 
beyond  onr  conception,  he  is  so  in  his  whole  nature  and 
not  in  certain  peaks  which  rise  beyond  our  vision.  The 
relation  is  one  of  blending  of  different  aspects.  God 
is  a  being  like  ourselves  in  a  true  sense, — our  other 
self.  He  is  this  in  his  whole  being  and  not  in  a  mere  part 
of  it.  There  is  no  mode  or  attribute  of  his  nature  which, 
from  the  point  of  view  of  this  analogy,  does  not  become 
intelligible  and  in  view  of  which  God  does  not  become  our 
fellow. 

But  we  must  not  forget  at  any  and  every  stage  of 
this  way  of  conceiving,  that  there  is  another  point  of  view 
and  another  way  of  conceiving  which  must  blend  with  and 
modify  our  conceptions  of  fellowship.  That  is  the  point  of 
view  of  transcendence  from  which  arises  the  necessity  of 
regarding  God  as  a  being  who  in  relation  to  our  finitude  and 
relativity  is  infinite  and  absolute.  The  idea  of  the  infinite- 
ness  and  absoluteness  of  God  can  arise  only  from  the  appli- 
cation of  the  principle  of  transcendence.  The  use  of 
self-analogy  is  to  be  qualified,  then,  at  every  step  by  the 
application  of  this  principle.  But  how,  we  may  ask,  is 
the  application  of  this  principle  to  be  effected?  Well, 
we  may  take  the  following  as  an  illustration.  Employing 
the  analogy  of  selfhood  we  regard  God  as  a  being  of  the 
self-type ;  that  is,  one  that  is  modelled  after  the  plan  of  our 
own  selfhood.  But  in  conceiving  God  as  a  self  we  must 
apply  the  principle  of  transcendence  to  our  conception  and 
regard  him  as  an  absolute  and  infinite  self,  — as  a  self,  in 
short,  that  is  not  limited  in  its  scope  by  the  agency  of  other 
selves  outside  of  it  on  its  own  plane,  or  by  worlds  that  lie 
outside  of  the  content  of  its  own  consciousness.  The 
divine  self  must  be  an  all-including  self.  Again,  we  must 
regard  the  divine  self  as  one  that  is  not  limited  or  restricted 
in   its   agency   or  that   at   some   part   is   forced   like   the 


612  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

finite  selves  to  become  passive.  God,  to  use  the  Aris- 
totelian concept,  must  be  regarded  as  punts  actus,  and 
this  implies  that  the  divine  activity  is  one  of  wholly 
free  and  unrestricted  agency.  Moreover,  by  the  use  of  the 
self-analogy  we  represent  God  as  personal  in  the  sense  that 
his  nature  expresses  itself  in  forms  of  manifestation  cor- 
responding to  the  divine  thought,  the  divine  feeling  and 
the  divine  will.  But  in  ascribing  personality  to  God  we 
must  not  forget  that  it  is  a  personality  touched  with  tran- 
scendence. The  thought  of  God  will  be  an  all-compre- 
hending thought,  his  love  will  give  itself  a  free  and  all- 
including  expression  and  his  volition  will  have  a  scope  that 
will  not  be  affected  by  the  hampering  bonds  of  finite  effort. 
Again,  in  the  employment  of  the  self -analogy  we  represent 
God's  agency  as  purposive  in  its  character.  But  we  must 
not  forget  to  apply  the  principle  of  transcendence  and  to 
conceive  the  divine  purpose  as  one  that  comprehends  and 
realizes  all  finite  purposes.  There  is  a  sense,  it  is  true,  in 
which  God  may  transcend  our  thoughts  in  ways  we  cannot 
imagine.  We  have  no  immediate  intuition  of  the  divine  na- 
ture and  it  may,  for  aught  we  know,  contain  continents  of 
being  of  which  we  can  have  no  conception  at  all.  But  this, 
if  it  be  true,  and  we  see  no  reason  for  denying  it,  lies 
outside  of  the  sphere  of  vital  interest.  God,  so  far  as  he  Is 
real  to  us  at  all,  is  a  being  conceived  after  the  analogies  of 
our  own  selfhood  but  touched  with  the  principle  of  tran- 
scendence. 

When  we  propose  the  question  of  God's  reality,  we  are, 
in  fact,  asking  in  what  sense  God  is  necessary  to  a  system 
of  experience.  The  question  is  more  complex  than  appears 
on  the  surface.  There  is  a  sense  in  which  God  does  not 
exist,  since  he  does  not  appear  in  the  field  of  phenomena. 
We  arrive  nowhere  in  experience  at  a  presentation  of  the 
divine  being.  If  we  define  existence  as  phenomenal  pres- 
ence, it  cannot  be  said  that  God  exists.  If,  however,  we 
employ  the  term  existence  in  a  broader  and  deeper  sense 
as  meaning  that  which  is  in  any  true  sense  real,  then  the 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OP  GOD.  613 

question  of  God's  existence  becomes  one  with  that  of  his 
reality.     It  is  only  in  the  Latter  sense  that  the  problem  of 
existence  will  be  involved  in  this  discussion.     Now   when 
we  ask  how  God  is  to  be  regarded  as  real,  we  arc  asking  in 
what  sense  he  is  necessary  to  experience.     We  have  already 
seen  that  the  postulate  of  such  a  being  is  necessary  and  that 
the  evolution  of  our  idea  of  him  is  one  of  the  profoundest 
functions  of  our  experience.     But  the  question  of  reality  is 
something  different  from  all  that.     AVe  are  not  seeking  here 
the  ontological  grounds  of  the  genesis  and  development  of 
the  divine  idea,     Kather,  our  question  here  is  one  of  value, 
and  what  we  are  really  asking  is,  What  interest  of  expe- 
rience does  the  divine  idea  satisfy,  and  are  there  value-de- 
mands on  the  satisfaction  of  which  its  validity  depends? 
Clearly  we  are  here  in  very  deep  water  and  not  far  from  the 
vital  heart  of  the  whole  question  of  religion.     To  enter  the 
field  by  successive  steps,  let  us  state  as  our  first  proposi- 
tion, what  should  probably  come  last  in  any  well-ordered 
discussion,  that  the  idea  of  God  may  claim  reality  in  so  far 
as  it  satisfies  the  demand  for  a  metaphysical  grounding  of 
the  world.     If  as  theists  we  can  show  that  the  most  rational 
solution  of  the  world-problem  is  to  be  found  in  the  idea  of 
a  divine  being,  we  have  vindicated  so  far  forth  the  reality 
of  that  conception.     Now,  altogether  apart  from  the  dis- 
tinctively aesthetic  elements  which  enter  into  the  situation, 
the  general  metaphysical  investigation  leads,  as  we  have 
tried  to  show,  to  the  postulate  of  an  intelligent  being  acting 
under  the  categories  of  thought  and  purpose,  as  supplying 
the  most  satisfactory  answer  to  the  demand  for  a  metaphys- 
ical grounding  of  the  world.     We  have  found,  in  the  first 
place,  that  only  a  principle  of  intelligence  can  begin  to  meet 
the  requirement  of  world-grounding ;  and  when  we  postulate 
intelligence  we  have  let  in  the  camel's  head  and  the  force  of 
the    logic    of   the   situation    drives    us    on    until   we   have 
habilitated  intelligence  in  the  conscious  thought  and  pur- 
pose of  a  being  that  is  conceived  after  the  type  of  our  own 
self-analogy.    Taking  our  departure  from  any  point  within 


614  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

experience,  we  have  found  that  this  result  is  inevitable. 
The  implication  of  it  here  is  that  the  idea  of  God  fulfills 
a  necessary  requirement  of  our  experience  and  that  it  bears 
this  fundamental  test  of  reality.  That  which  is  real  in 
experience  will  be  either  actual  or  necessary.  We  cannot 
say  directly  that  God  is  actual,  for  experience  supplies  us 
qo  data  for  a  representation,  but  we  can  say  that  God  is 
necessary,  inasmuch  as  the  whole  of  our  experience  embodies 
the  satisfaction  of  its  metaphysical  demands  in  the  idea  of 
God. 

But  the  idea,  in  order  to  be  completely  real,  must  be 
able  to  satisfy  other  and  more  aesthetic  requirements. 
Man  shapes  the  idea  of  God  not  merely  to  satisfy  the 
requirements  of  metaphysical  theory,  but  to  fill  out  and 
ideally  meet  the  requirements  of  his  own  practical  life. 
It  is  this  side  of  the  requirement  that  is  most  prominent  in 
the  religious  consciousness.  The  religious  demand  is  not 
so  much  for  the  true  as  it  is  for  the  good  and  this  good  is 
not  a  mere  utilitarian  good,  but  rather  a  rich  ideal  of  life 
which  includes  both  completeness  and  satisfaction.  The 
emotional  element  in  religion  will  always  be  its  most  promi- 
nent feature  because  what  it  certainly  aims  at  is  not  simply 
a  good  but  an  ideally  complete  good, — one,  therefore,  in 
which  the  emotional  nature  will  find  its  fullest  satisfaction. 
Let  us  suppose,  then,  that  the  idea  of  God,  in  addition  to 
meeting  the  requirements  of  metaphysical  theory,  is  able 
also  to  satisfy  ideally  the  demand  in  experience  for  the 
good;  that  it  meets  this  demand  in  a  way  that  fulfills  the 
aesthetic  requirements  of  the  emotional  nature,  and  that 
God  becomes  not  only  the  ideal  of  goodness  but  also  the 
ideal  of  beauty.  It  will  certainly  contribute  greatly  to  the 
reality  of  the  conception  when  we  are  able  to  say  that  the 
practical  value  of  the  divine  idea  is  as  great  as  we  have 
shown  its  theoretic  value  to  be.  That  the  idea  of  God  is 
able  to  satisfy  these  demands  is  in  need  of  little  demon- 
stration. It  is  true  that  the  divine  idea,  like  any  other 
ideal,  has  been  developed  gradually  and  that  in  its  earlier 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  615 

stages  it  has  not  been  free  from  imperfect  and  even  vicious 
elements.  Bnt  this  is  inevitable  in  case  of  an  ideal.  As 
man  develops  in  intelligence  and  moral  purity  his  ideals 
develop  also,  but  if  they  have  in  them  the  stuff  of 
which  true  ideals  are  made  they  will  not  only  survive  the 
process  but  will  themselves  be  the  guiding  stars  of  progress. 
This  is  conspicuously  true  of  the  idea  of  God.  Not  the 
worst  but  the  best  possession  of  a  people  will  be  their  idea 
of  God.  This  will  be  the  fountain  head  of  their  highest 
spiritual  life  and  aspiration,  and  in  the  minds  of  the  most 
gifted  members  of  the  race  it  will  become  the  ideal  of  new 
spiritual  advance  and  enlightenment.  The  divine  idea  will 
always  stand  in  front  of  progress,  therefore,  as  the  ideal  of 
complete  good,  and  the  standard  of  that  which  when  real- 
ized will  yield  complete  emotional  satisfaction.  This  being 
true,  we  need  not  fear  that  religion  will  ever  lose  its  hold 
on  the  heart  of  the  race. 

Another  test  of  the  reality  of  the  divine  idea  is  its 
ability  to  meet  those  requirements  which  spring  out  of  the 
imperfection,  the  need  and  the  sinfulness  of  our  nature. 
The  idea  of  God  might  be  metaphysically  satisfactory  and 
it  might  even  stand  as  the  complete  ideal  of  good,  both  for 
the  will  and  the  emotions,  without  thereby  coming  into 
very  close  relations  with  our  lives.  It  might  stand  simply 
as  an  unapproachable  standard  that  had  little  power  to 
affect  the  vital  issues  of  our  lives.  Man  as  he  is  conscious 
of  himself  is  an  imperfect  being  who  has  to  struggle  some- 
times unsuccessfully  with  temptations  and  sins.  The  evils 
of  his  existence  sometimes  threaten  to  overcome  him  and 
he  is  often  forced  to  sit  and  weep  over  shattered  hopes  and 
ideals.  How  can  God  be  real  to  such  a  being  ?  Not  simply 
as  the  unapproachable  ideal  of  what  he  would  strive  for  if 
he  were  able,  but  rather  as  the  idea  of  a  being  who  may 
come  into  intimate  relations  with  the  struggling  soul  in  the 
midst  of  its  imperfections  and  the  pollutions  of  its  sinful- 
ness and  help  it  to  overcome  and  become  pure.  It  is  the 
idea  of  a  God  of  compassion  and  helpfulness  that  appeals 


616  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

directly  to  our  human  experience,  the  idea  of  a  being  who 
not  only  shines  afar  off  in  the  cold  glories  of  a  star  in  the 
firmament,  but  one  who  comes  into  intimate  fellowship  with 
man ;  one  who  touches  and  stimulates  and  purines  him  with 
the  fire  of  the  divine  love ;  one  whose  touch  has  purification 
and  healing  in  it  and  whose  presence  is  a  spring  of  undying 
hope  as  well  as  a  fountain  of  unfailing  strength.  In  short, 
it  is  when  the  idea  of  God  coalesces  with  that  of  the  Christ 
that  it  achieves  the  highest  claim  to  reality.  We  do  not 
need  to  show  at  this  stage  how  the  divine  idea  works  out 
in  the  sphere  of  living  manifestations  as  the  Christ-idea. 
That  all  religions  have  the  germ  of  the  Christ-idea  in  them 
may  be  shown,  and  that  in  the  higher  religions  this  germ 
develops  into  the  religious  prophets  and  messiahs  of  the 
race,  and  that  in  the  highest  spiritual  revelation  of  the 
religious  consciousness  of  the  race  the  Christ-idea  becomes 
the  symbol  for  the  manifestation  of  God  to  the  soul  of  man 
in  the  most  direct  personal  and  helpful  form ;  all  this  goes 
to  show  how  inevitable  the  Christ-idea  is  when  once  the 
human  consciousness  has  come  to  a  sense  of  the  divine 
presence  in  the  world.  Now,  it  is  in  its  coalescence  with 
the  Christ-idea  that  the  idea  of  God  acquires  its  highest 
claim  to  reality.  I  do  not  mean  to  say  that  the  idea  of 
God  involves  the  Christ-idea  by  any  species  of  logical  neces- 
sity. It  is  not  the  claim  of  logical  deduction  we  are  follow- 
ing here.  A  man  may  become  a  theist  and  may  stop  there, 
either  because  of  intellectual  difficulties  in  the  way  of  fur- 
ther progress  or  because  he  feels  no  special  emotional  need 
of  the  Christ.  The  logic  we  are  following  here  is  that  of  ex- 
perience ;  and  what  is  maintained  is  that  in  a  normal  expe- 
rience the  nexus  between  the  idea  of  God  and  the  Christ-idea 
is  obvious  and  that  the  motive  which  leads  to  the  translation 
of  the  idea  of  God  into  that  of  the  Christ  is  one  that  springs 
from  the  imperfections  of  our  human  experience.  The 
most  real  conception  of  God  is  that  of  the  Divine  Helper 
of  men  in  their  struggle  to  overcome  the  imperfection  and 
evils  of  their  lot  and  to  realize  perfection  of  life. 


chap.  ill.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  (}17 

Lastly,  it  will  be  clear  that  the  reality  of  the  idea  of 
God  will  be  measured  by  its  ability  to  harmonize  with,  and 
in  a  true  sense  to  unify,  all  the  other  real  interests  and 
ideals  of  life.  We  are  in  a  bad  predicament  when  our  cul- 
ture points  east,  our  science  north,  and  our  religion 
south.  To  one  the  elements  of  whose  experience  arc 
in  such  chaos  as  this,  the  idea  of  God  cannot,  in  the 
nature  of  the  case,  have  much  significance.  But  let 
us  suppose  that  our  culture  and  our  science  are  at  one 
in  the  line  of  truth  and  that  our  practical  ideals  all  center 
in  the  line  of  good.  If,  then,  our  idea  of  God  be  that  of  a 
being  in  whose  experience  the  true  and  the  good  are  unified 
so  that  there  can  be  no  conflict,  our  religion  then  becomes 
the  principle  which  unifies  all  the  elements  of  our  life  and 
the  idea  of  God  becomes  the  central  force  in  our  experience. 
Now  it  is  clear  that  the  normal  function  of  such  an  idea  as 
that  of  God  is  one  of  unification.  God  stands  as  the  ideally 
complete  realization  of  all  we  may  aspire  to.  He  is  simply 
the  soul  writ,  not  in  large,  but  in  transcendent  terms, 
and  the  idea  of  him  is  one  that  ideally  comprehends  and 
completes  all  the  elements  of  our  experience.  Naturally, 
then,  the  idea  of  God  ought  to  bear  to  our  experience  and 
all  its  elements  the  relation  of  a  unifying  principle.  The 
reality  of  the  idea  of  God  depends,  therefore,  on  the  degree 
to  which  it  vitally  relates  itself  to  our  experience.  AVere 
it  a  mere  abstraction  without  any  close  connection  with  the 
life  of  man  it  could  lay  little  claim  to  reality.  But  that 
has  the  highest  claim  to  reality  which  not  only  touches 
experience  vitally  at  every  point,  but  is  also  necessary  to  it 
as  its  ideal  and  its  unifying  principle. 

Another  problem  which  arises  here  is  that  of  the  relation 
of  the  idea  of  God  to  the  world.  This  is,  of  course,  a 
broad  question,  and  Ave  can  only  touch  on  its  most  vital 
bearings.  But  much  elaboration  will  not  be  necessary, 
inasmuch  as  most  of  our  positions  have  already  been  argued 
in  other  places.  We  have  seen  in  treating  of  the  relation 
of  nature  to  God  how  the  latter  is  a  necessary  presupposi- 


618  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

tion  of  the  former  and  how  nature  must  be  conceived  as 
grounded  in  the  divine  thought  and  purpose.  Here  wc 
approach  this  same  relation  from  the  other  side.  How 
does  the  idea  of  God  relate  itself  to  the  world ;  that  is,  to 
the  sphere  of  finite  manifestation  and  productivity?  If 
we  take  the  world  as  a  phenomenon  or  as  a  system  of  phe- 
nomenal existence,  it  is  clear  that  the  idea  of  God  will  stand 
related  to  it  as  its  author ;  as  the  source  of  its  existence  and 
the  ground  of  its  dependence.  In  its  cosmological  aspect, 
the  idea  of  God  is  that  of  a  self-existent  being  which  con- 
tains in  itself  the  initiative  of  phenomenal  activity.  We 
have  seen,  however,  that  the  notion  of  a  mere  fountain  of 
spontaneity  is  not  sufficient,  and  that  the  world  must 
be  grounded  in  prevision  and  purpose.  The  idea  of  God 
must  be  conceived,  then,  as  relating  itself  to  the  world  in 
terms  of  thought  and  purpose.  In  terms  of  thought,  since 
it  is  not  only  impossible  to  conceive  the  world  as  originating 
by  accident  or  chance,  or  in  any  other  way  than  through 
the  prevision  of  a  thinking  principle,  but  it  is  also  impos- 
sible, taking  the  world  as  a  present,  existent  fact,  to  con- 
ceive how  it  could  exist  in  any  sort  of  unity  except  as 
related  to  a  thought  which  comprehends  all  its  details.  We 
do  not  need  to  thresh  out  this  issue  at  this  point,  for  it  must 
be  clear  by  this  time  that,  in  the  last  analysis,  no  other 
principle  can  organize  the  many  into  one  or  go  out  from  the 
one  to  the  many,  than  one  of  thought  or  conception.  The 
divine  thought  relates  God  to  the  world,  then,  as  the  being 
in  whose  conception  the  world  is  first  instituted  as  an  idea 
before  it  becomes  constituted  as  a  fact.  The  thought  of 
God  is  therefore  the  intellectual  prius  of  the  world. 
But  thought,  as  we  have  seen,  does  not  become  a  realiz- 
ing activity  until  it  becomes  informed  with  selective  interest 
and  volition.  When  so  informed  it  becomes  purpose,  and 
purpose  may  here  be  defined  as  the  thought  of  being  made 
selective  by  interest  or  feeling,  and  passing,  through 
volition,  into  being  as  reality.  Purpose,  then,  is  the  con- 
crete and  synthetic  category  which  expresses  the  relation  of 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  619 

God  to  that  initial  process  in  which  the  world  is  first 
launched  into  existence.  The  divine  thought  conceives  the 
world  and  this  world-concept  through  selective  interest  and 
effective  will  becomes  real.  The  very  first  relation  of  God 
to  the  world  arises  thus  through  his  omniscience.  He 
is  the  All-Knower  and  the  world  stands  defined  in  his 
thought.  But  while  this  is  logically  true,  it  is  nevertheless 
impossible  to  conceive  thought  as  acting  without  interest. 
The  divine  feeling  must  somehow  be  implicit  from  the 
outset  as  a  selective  motive.  Furthermore,  a  feeling- 
informed  thought ;  that  is,  a  thought  accompanied  with  love, 
cannot  be  conceived  as  acting  apart  from  volition.  The 
interest-motive  in  the  thought  will  constitute  the  spring 
of  a  will-impulse  in  which  the  object  of  the  thought  is 
realized.  The  divine  thought  in  which  the  w7orld  is  con- 
ceived must  then  be  represented  in  its  concreteness  as 
holding  in  it  the  selective  interest  of  feeling  and  the  im- 
pulse to  realize.  If,  when  we  say  that  the  world  is  realized 
in  the  divine  thought,  we  mean  this  perfectly  concrete 
thought,  then  we  say  practically  the  same  thing  as  when 
we  affirm  that  it  is  realized  in  the  divine  purpose,  for  the 
notion  of  purpose  involves  the  same  elements. 

It  is  needful,  however,  to  connect  the  idea  of  God  not 
only  with  the  existence  of  the  world,  but  also  with  its 
productivity.  We  mean  by  productivity  those  energies  or 
processes  by  means  of  which  it  is  maintained  and  developed. 
Now  it  is  clear  that  the  idea  of  maintenance  connects  God 
with  the  substance,  the  being  of  the  world,  while  that  of 
development  relates  him  to  its  movements  and  changes. 
That  the  world  should  maintain  itself  is,  in  truth,  as 
unthinkable  as  that  it  should  constitute  or  develop  itself. 
For  if  the  world  originates  in  a  thought-informed  purpose, 
its  maintenance  will  be  nothing  more  nor  less  than  per- 
sistence in  that  purpose.  The  divine  purpose  is  stable 
and,  therefore,  the  world  persists  in  being.  The  divine 
purpose  is  stable  and,  therefore,  the  world  moves  for- 
ward  in   a   uniform   wray.     The   divine   purpose   is  stable 


620  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

and,  therefore,  the  forces  and  energies  of  the  world  persist 
and  are  conserved.  Were  the  purpose  that  there  should  be 
a  world  to  relax  for  a  moment ;  were  the  God  of  the  world 
to  go  visiting  like  old  Baal,  how  could  it  be  otherwise  than 
that  the  world  would  collapse  and  the  universe  fall  into 
nothing-less?  Creation  and  maintenance,  as  the  old  theo- 
logians saw,  are  practically  one  and  the  same.  The  prob- 
lem of  God's  relation  to  the  development  of  the  world  has 
already  been  treated  in  one  aspect  of  it  in  the  section  on 
nature  and  evolution  in  the  preceding  chapter.  We  there 
concluded  that  the  notion  of  evolution  is  not  final  and  that 
the  process  of  evolution  must  be  rooted  in  the  divine  pur- 
pose. This  we  reiterate  here  and  go  on  to  another  aspect 
of  the  relation.  If  God  is  related  to  the  energies  and 
processes  of  the  world  as  their  grounding  principle,  it  fol- 
lows that  he  is  dynamically  related.  We  are  not  arguing 
the  point  of  unity  here.  It  has  been  sufficiently  shown 
that  the  plural  elements  of  the  world  can  be  unified  only  by 
relating  them  to  the  one  divine  purpose.  Let  us  ask,  how- 
ever, how  this  unifying  function  is  to  be  realized.  It  is 
clear  that  the  divine  purpose  will  unify  the  energies  of  the 
world  not  merely  by  comprehending  them  in  a  thought, 
but  by  actually  initiating  them.  Let  us  ask,  then,  what 
this  initiative  involves.  Take,  for  example,  the  notion  of 
natural  causation,  which  is  that  of  action  deriving  its 
impulse  from  another.  This  form  of  conditioned  activity 
is  not  final,  but  has  a  presupposition ;  that  of  activity 
arising  from  an  inner  impulse,  i.  e.,  self-impelled  activity. 
If  now,  following  this  analogy,  we  trace  the  relative 
energies  or  powers  of  the  world  back  to  a  point  where 
the  necessary  implication  of  the  self-initiative  arises, 
and  relate  them  all  to  a  common  spring  of  absolute  energy, 
we  shall  have  solved  as  far  as  human  thought  can  solve  the 
problem  we  are  dealing  with  here.  It  is  not  open  to  us  to 
cut  the  powers  of  the  world  off  from  the  absolute  by  re- 
garding them  as  purely  relative,  and  then  to  refer  them  to 
the  divine  purpose  for  their  grounding.     The  relative  must 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  Q21 

always  involve  its  connection  with  the  absolute,  and  it  can 
do  so  only  by  containing  in  itself  the  implication  of  a  more 
ultimate  form  of  being.  This  is  true  of  the  powers  of  the 
world;  a  relative  form  of  energy  must  involve  absolute 
energy,  and  it  can  only  so  involve  the  absolute  by  pointing 
to  the  absolute  as  the  spring  from  which  it  emerges.  The 
divine  purpose  will  then  be  dynamically  related  to  the 
world  and  there  will  be  a  true  sense  in  which  it  can  be  said 
that  God  stands  related  to  the  world  as  its  first  cause. 

We  pass,  then,  to  the  last  theme  of  this  chapter,  the 
question  of  the  relation  of  the  idea  of  God  to  man.  The 
topics  here  will  be  (1)  God's  relation  to  man's  origin, 
(2)  his  relation  to  man's  being  and  activity.  Naturalism 
accounts  for  man's  origin  by  making  him  a  pure  product 
of  the  forces  of  nature.  But  we  have  seen  that,  however 
completely  we  may  regard  man  as  implicated  in  nature, 
yet  nature  itself  cannot  be  conceived  as  a  purely  self- 
developing  system,  but  must  be  referred,  in  the  last  analy- 
sis, to  the  divine  purpose.  If,  then,  nature  is  grounded  in 
the  divine  purpose,  man,  however  clearly  he  may  be  bound 
up  with  nature,  must  trace  his  origin  and  his  reason  for 
being  to  the  divine  purpose.  The  position  of  naturalism 
is  turned,  then,  and  can  no  longer  be  regarded  as  an  im- 
pediment to  the  metaphysical  doctrine  of  man.  How,  then, 
are  we  to  conceive  the  connection  of  God  with  man 's  origin  ? 
Of  course,  it  would  be  possible  here  to  divide  the  ques- 
tion and  to  consider  the  problem  of  man's  physical  nature 
apart  from  that  of  his  mental  and  spiritual  constitution. 
We  prefer,  however,  to  deal  with  the  problem  in  view  of 
the  concrete  nature  of  man.  Let  us  consider  man,  then,  in 
the  concrete,— man  as  a  living  organism  with  self-conscious 
and  spiritual  possibilities,— as  approximately  and  phe- 
nomenally a  product  of  natural  evolution.  This  will 
justify  the  biologist  in  referring  the  parts  of  his'  physical 
constitution  to  the  processes  of  organic  growth  and  develop- 
ment. It  will  justify  the  physiological  psychologist  in 
connecting  the  growth  of  consciousness  with  the  develop- 


622  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

ment  of  the  nervous  system  and,  in  a  sense,  treating  thought 
as  a  function  of  the  brain.  It  will  justify  the  genetic 
psychologist  in  resolving  the  mind  of  the  adult  into  a 
developing  series  the  natural  causes  and  conditions  of 
which  may  be  determined,  and  it  will  justify  the  anthro- 
pologist in  connecting  man's  development  both  bodily 
and  mental  with  the  general  forces  of  nature  and  hu- 
manity. If  our  doctrine  of  nature  be  true,  however,  these 
natural  explanations,  or  any  other  that  can  be  given,  will 
not  cut  man  off  from  a  divine  origin.  We  do  not  say  that 
man  is  a  product  of  nature  and  nevertheless  of  divine 
origin.  We  say  rather,  man  is  a  product  of  nature,  part 
and  parcel  of  nature,  and  by  virtue  of  that  fact,  of  divine 
origin.  Let  us  once  become  thoroughly  grounded  in  the 
doctrine  of  the  divine  origin  of  nature  and  we  shall  not  have 
any  trouble  with  the  natural  extraction  of  man.  We  do 
not  need  to  lift  man  above  nature  in  order  to  connect  him 
with  his  divine  father.  Through  nature  he  comes  from 
God.  How,  then,  are  we  to  conceive  God's  relation  to 
man's  origin?  In  the  first  place,  we  must  find  the  first 
term  of  the  relation  in  the  divine  thought  and  purpose. 
There  is  no  other  ultimate  reason  for  our  existence  than 
that  we  are  the  objects  of  God's  thought  and  purpose. 
If  God  did  not  in  the  first  place  think  of  you  and  me  we 
should  never  be  thought  of  at  all.  If  God  did  not  choose 
us  and  propose  our  existence  we  should  never  come  into 
being  at  all.  If  God  did  not  constitute  us  in  the  realizing 
activity  of  his  will  we  should  never  become  real  at  all. 
Just  as  nature  traces  its  initiative  to  the  divine  spring,  so 
we  trace  our  special  initiative  to  the  divine  thought  and 
purpose.  Conceived  in  the  divine  thought  and  brought 
forth  in  the  divine  volition,  we  are  in  truth  the  sons  of 
God.  After  what  has  already  been  said  we  do  not  need  to 
argue  that  man  as  a  son  of  God  may  be  a  product  of  nature 
inasmuch  as  nature  herself  is  God 's  handmaid. 

The  question  of  God's  relation  to  the  being  and  activity 
of  man  is  one  that  involves  profound  issues.     How  can  God 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  623 

be  related  to  man  as  his  author  without  in  fact  deifying 
man  himself?  If  in  the  act  of  constituting  man  God  is 
simply  positing  himself,  does  not  man  himself  become  either 
a  mere  appearance  or  wholly  divine?  We  cannot  take  the 
ground  that  creation  is  to  be  represented  as  the  divine  posit- 
ing itself.  Let  us  recall  the  method  by  which  the  finite  con- 
sciousness is  able  to  reach  an  intelligible  conception  of 
God.  It  is  by  the  employment  of  the  self-analogy.  In 
his  experience  of  his  own  selfhood  man  realizes  the  type  of 
being  which  he  applies  to  the  divine  nature.  God  is 
another  self  and  that  renders  him  intelligible  and  makes 
it  possible  for  us  finites  to  come  into  intelligent  communion 
with  him  although  all  our  conceptions  of  his  nature  must 
be  qualified  by  the  principle  of  transcendence.  Now  it  is 
by  a  kind  of  reversal  of  this  analogy  that  we  shall  be  helped 
to  an  intelligible  conception  of  God's  relation  to  man's 
nature.  In  his  own  divine  self-consciousness,  no  doubt, 
God  finds  the  type  of  being  by  which  his  objective  thought 
will  be  guided  in  its  act  of  conceiving  objective  existence. 
All  the  individuals  in  the  world  will,  no  doubt,  be  de- 
termined in  their  nature  after  this  type.  God's  creative 
thought  will,  therefore,  be  generically  one,  but  specifically 
and  individually  many.-  But  it  will  be  in  the  thought  of 
man,  of  a  self-conscious  being  whose  activities  proceed 
under  the  categories  of  thought  and  purpose,  that  the  self- 
type  of  the  divine  will  find  its  most  complete  objective 
embodiment.  "When  we  say,  then,  that  God  conceives  man 
in  his  thought  and  realizes  him  in  his  volition,  we  mean, 
that  here  his  thought  and  volition  are  embodying  them- 
selves in  beings  of  his  own  type.  We  are  justified  then  in 
saying  that  the  creative  activity  of  the  divine  will  be  con- 
stitutive of  beings  after  his  own  type  and,  therefore,  con- 
taining in  them  the  potentiality  of  selfhood.  But  if  we 
go  further  and  say  that  God  simply  repeats  himself 
in  his  acts  of  creation,  we  say  what  cannot  be  true  and 
what  is  disproved  by  our  own  finite  experience ;  where- 
as, if  we  essay  to  conceive  the  modus  of  the  divine  energy 


624  DEDUCTIONS.  part  m. 

in  constituting  finite  and  relative  beings  we  are  attempting 
what  is  beyond  our  powers.  The  finite  consciousness  finds 
in  its  approaches  to  the  divine  that  there  is  ever  a  point 
which  baffles  its  conceptions  and  forbids  a  clear  intuition  of 
the  divine  nature.  In  like  manner  when  we  attempt  to 
represent  to  ourselves  how  the  divine  may  initiate  beings 
and  activities  which  are  finite  and  relative,  we  find  ourselves 
estopped  by  the  same  difficulty  transposed.  If  we  could 
reach  a  clear  intuition  of  the  divine  nature,  then  it  would 
no  doubt  be  possible  to  represent  the  mode  of  the  con- 
nection of  the  divine  with  the  human.  The  difficulty  is 
how  to  overcome  the  obstacle  involved  in  the  x  term  which 
symbolizes  the  vanishment  of  the  difference  between  our 
approximating  conception  and  its  transcendent  object. 
Here  we  meet  the  x  term  in  the  downward  way  from  the 
divine  to  the  human,  and  although  there  are  ample  rational 
grounds  for  the  general  doctrine  we  are  here  advocating, 
it  is  not  capable  of  clear  and  decisive  demonstration. 

In  his  relation  to  man's  being,  then,  we  are  justified  in 
saying  that  God  constitutes  him  after  the  fundamental 
type  of  his  own  nature.  It  is  this  type  which  determines 
him  as  a  self-conscious  being  such  as  we  know  him  to  be, 
and  it  is  this  type  which  constitutes  him  a  real  son  of  God 
and  enables  him  to  call  God  his  father.  The  question  of 
God's  relation  to  man's  activity  is  one  that  involves  similar 
issues.  If  man  is  not  the  unmodified  projection  of  God, 
so  to  speak,  into  the  phenomenal  world,  then  his  activities 
cannot  be  regarded  as  mere  continuations  of  the  divine 
activity.  In  a  subsequent  chapter  it  will  appear  how  this 
fact  enables  us  to  ground  a  sphere  of  freedom  and  respon- 
sible activity  for  man.  The  question  here  is  different  and 
concerns  specially  God's  relation  to  the  sphere  of  human 
agency.  If  we  waive  the  difficulty  as  to  the  constitu- 
tion of  the  finite  human  agent,  we  have  remaining  the  ques- 
tion :  given  the  finite  agent  and  its  activities,  How  are  the 
divine  being  and  agency  related  to  these?  In  the  first 
place  it  will  follow,  if  man  be  not  a  mere  continuation  of  the 


chap.  in.  IDEA  OF  GOD.  625 

divine,  that  he  has  a  real  individuality  and  that  his  self- 
hood has  at  its  heart  that  unsharable  core  of  conscious 
being  which  may  not  be  immediately  determined  even  by  the 
divine  itself.  Instead  of  saying  simply  that  the  divine  will 
respects  the  human  to  the  extent  of  preserving  its  freedom, 
we  go  further  here  and  translate  the  fact  into  a  necessity 
of  the  situation.  The  inner  core  of  selfhood  is  something 
that  the  divine  cannot  but  respect.  We  say  it  reverently ; 
God  might  be  conceived  as  annihilating  a  soul  by  with- 
drawing from  it  his  sustaining  thought  and  purpose,  but  it 
is  inconceivable  that  he  should  thus  sustain  it  and  at  the 
same  time  rifle  the  citadel  of  its  being.  If,  now,  we  con- 
cede this  inner  citadel  to  man,  it  will  follow  that  he  is  a 
being  capable  of  conceiving  and  pursuing  real  purposes, 
and  that  the  problem  of  the  relation  of  God  to  human 
activity  resolves  itself  into  the  question  of  the  relation 
of  the  divine  purpose  to  the  purposes  of  man.1  Here  we 
come  upon  somewhat  familiar  ground.  We  have  argued 
in  another  place  that  God's  relation  to  the  evil  purpose  is 
not  in  its  inception  which  may  be  an  act  of  rebellion 
against  his  will,  but  rather  in  its  execution,  that  is,  in  the 
system  of  objective  activities  by  which  the  purpose  realizes 
itself.  It  is  in  this  objective  sphere  that  the  same  activities 
which  further  the  evil  purpose  may  also,  as  parts  of  a  larger 
system  of  activities,  contribute  to  the  realization  of  the 
divine  purpose.  We  have  simply  to  generalize  this  prin- 
ciple in  order  to  reach  the  solution  of  the  general  problem. 
Just  as  we  have  seen  that  the  divine  purpose  is  related  to 
and  works  out  in  a  system  of  world  activities,  so  our  human 
purposes  realize  themselves  through  the  movements  of  the 

1  It  is  a  characteristic  weakness  of  Monistic  Idealism  in  most  of 
its  current  forms  that  its  principle  must  be  strained  in  order  to 
maintain  the  reality  of  the  finite  individual.  It  is  not  enough  to  be 
able  to  say  that  God  means  me  in  his  purpose  and  therefore  I  am, 
unless  at  the  same  time  I  can  assume  that  in  purposing  me  he  has 
constituted  me  a  real  being.  It  does  not  satisfy  the  claim  of  reality 
to  say  that  I  am  a  finite  mode  or  a  specialized  mode  of  the  divine 
purpose. 
40 


626  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

objective  world.  We  have  to  set  some  part  of  the  system 
of  natural  forces  in  motion  in  order  to  realize  our  pur- 
poses. But  the  whole  world  of  activity  is  the  objective 
manifestation  of  the  divine,  the  field  in  which  God  is 
realizing  his  purposes.  It  follows,  then,  that  the  outer 
movements  of  our  purposes  entwine  about  and  become  part 
of  this  divine  system  of  agencies.  This  is  the  encourage- 
ment of  the  good  man.  For  he  wishes  above  all  that 
God's  purpose  should  be  realized  and  he  regards  his  own 
purpose  as  tributary  to  the  divine.  He  can  be  assured, 
then,  that  though  his  finite  purpose  be  set  aside,  yet  the 
efforts  he  is  putting  forth  will  nevertheless  serve  that 
divine  good  which  he  has  most  at  heart.  But  the  evil  man, 
in  so  far  as  he  is  only  evil,  can  take  no  comfort,  for  though 
his  evil  purpose  succeed  within  the  narrow  limits  of  his 
own  life,  yet  he  has  the  assurance  that  his  triumph  is 
temporary  and  that  in  the  wider  system  of  events  his 
purpose  is  sure  to  come  to  naught. 


CHAPTER  IV 


NATUBE   OF  MAN. 


The  naturalistic  theory  of  man  is  one  that  not  only  regards 
him  as  a  natural  product,  but  also  as  a  product  of  perish- 
able nature,  for  it  fails  to  find  in  the  nature  of  man  that 
spring  of  permanence  which  we  found  it  necessary  to  locate 
in  nature.  It  follows,  then,  that  man  cannot  establish 
his  claim  to  being  more  than  a  phenomenon  in  the  world, 
and,  as  such,  a  mere  passing  mode  of  being.  There  is  much 
in  experience,  both  individual  and  racial,  that  falls  in  with 
such  a  doctrine  as  this  and  lends  color  to  it.  If  we  com- 
pare the  life  of  the  race  with  that  of  nature,  nothing 
seems  more  transient  or  insignificant.  The  social  organism 
and  the  historic  order  of  the  world  are  in  the  highest 
degree  unstable,  they  pass  away  as  a  tale  that  is  told 
and  the  geological  record  which  so  immeasurably  antedated 
them  moves  on  issuing  volume  after  volume  of  its  story 
long  ages  after  the  world  has  become  unfit  for  the  habitation 
of  man.  If  we  take  the  record  of  the  individual  we  find  it 
even  more  fragile  and  momentary.  Compared  with  your 
life  or  mine,  the  social  organism  and  the  historic  order  of 
the  world  are  permanence  itself.  We  execute  a  few  move- 
ments more  or  less  abortive,  and  lo !  in  a  night  we  have 
dropped  from  our  place  in  the  world  of  change  and  that 
which  knew  us  once  knows  us  no  more  forever.  And  by 
reason  of  this  brevity  and  instability  of  our  existence  we 
are  doomed  to  see  our  ideals  shattered  and  every  great  and 

627 


628  DEDUCTIONS.  tart  in. 

dignified  work  which  we  may  enter  upon  arrested  before  it 
has  properly  begun.  Naturalism  seems  to  voice  man's 
despair  of  life  in  view  of  its  futility, — his  contempt  for 
himself  as  a  being  that  is  the  mere  sport  of  circumstance. 

This  representation  may  be  set  over  against  the  fact 
that  man  in  his  best  efforts,  in  his  aspirations  and  ideals, 
seems  to  be  a  builder  for  eternity.  Look  at  the  works  he 
executes,  the  cities  he  builds,  the  polities  he  establishes,  the 
social  orders  he  organizes,  the  civilizations  he  weaves  out 
of  his  own  heart,  the  literature  he  invents,  the  institutions 
and  cultures  he  builds  up.  Man  is  by  instinct  a  creator 
and  a  builder.  His  foot  no  sooner  touches  the  God-made 
earth,  his  habitation,  than  he  begins  to  dream  of  untold 
revolutions  and  new  worlds.  Man  is  ever  building  a  taber- 
nacle for  himself  that  shall  be  permanent  and  that  shall  be 
the  embodiment  of  his  ideals.  And  look  at  these  ideals  them- 
selves. Is  there  anything  within  the  limits  of  the  richest 
possibility  of  which  man  has  not  dreamed  and  to  which  he 
has  not  aspired?  What  regions  have  the  poets,  the  phil- 
osophers, the  conquerors,  the  artists,  the  musicians,  the 
prophets  and  the  Christs  of  the  race  left  unexplored  ?  And 
into  what  crevice  of  unexplored  mysteries  has  not  man's 
insatiable  curiosity  led  him  to  pry?  Now,  all  this  is 
wrapped  up  potentially  in  the  infant  who  is  the  super- 
lative dreamer  of  dreams.  It  is  found  in  solution  in  the 
experience  of  the  plain  man  whose  plodding  life  is  troubled 
with  undefined  longings  and  with  a  vague  sense  of  the 
riches  of  a  life  the  meaning  of  which  is  largely  hidden 
from  his  eyes.  And  it  comes  to  its  highest  and  completest 
expression  in  man's  moral  and  religious  experience,  where 
the  ideals  he  feels  himself  constrained  to  follow  are  amena- 
ble to  no  time  limit  but  write  themselves  in  the  characters 
of  the  eternal.  Man,  particularly  as  the  subject  of  a  re- 
ligious experience,  finds  himself  in  direct  fellowship  with 
the  Ancient  of  Days,  and  every  genuine  religious  aspiration 
of  his  nature  lays  hold  of  the  foundations  of  eternal  being. 

In  view  of  the  disconcerting  contradiction  which  thus 


chap.  iv.  NATUKE  OF  MAN.  62!) 

arises  between  what  man  aims  at  in  his  life  and  what 
seems  to  be  the  utter  worthlessness  and  instability  of  his 
existence,  the  question  of  the  real  nature  of  man  Incomes 
one  of  the  most  vital  concern.  Have  the  modern  researches 
into  the  mysteries  of  life  discovered  any  clues  that  will 
enable  us  to  suggest  any  rational  solution  to  the  apparent 
riddle  ?  The  answer  we  shall  attempt  to  this  question  will 
embrace  three  distinct  representations,  (1)  what  we  learn 
from  science  regarding  man's  nature,  (2)  what  we  learn 
from  a  consideration  of  experience,  and  (3)  what  result 
a  metaphysical  interpretation  leads  us  to.  The  scientific 
story  of  man  is  largely  one  of  modern  psychology  shading 
off,  of  course,  into  biology,  and  may  be  summarized  from 
the  various  points  of  view  from  which  the  psychologist 
approaches  his  task.  Now,  if  we  say  that  psychology  is 
the  investigation  of  the  phenomena  of  man's  conscious  life, 
it  has  been  discovered  that  there  are  several  points  of  view 
from  which  an  investigator  may  proceed.  He  may  assume 
the  introspective  role  and  may  essay  to  explore  conscious- 
ness directly  and  without  reference  to  its  material  condi- 
tions, with  a  view  to  determining  the  nature  and  laws  of  its 
characteristic  modes  of  activity.  He  may  decline  the  task 
of  pure  introspection  and  may  seek  to  determine  the  laws 
of  mental  activity  by  studying  its  correlations  with  the 
nervous  system  and  stating  his  results  in  terms  of  this 
correlation.  He  thus  becomes  a  plrysiological  psychologist. 
Or,  he  may  take  a  still  more  objective  attitude  and  may 
essay  to  study  the  activities  of  consciousness  in  connection 
with  the  movements  in  the  external  world  with  which  they 
are  correlated.  He  thus  becomes  an  experimental  psy- 
chologist. 

Now  these  different  points  of  view  pertain  to  the 
psychology  of  the  individual.  But  there  are  several  ultra- 
individual  standpoints  which,  the  psyciiologicisl  may  occupy. 
He  may  correlate  the  mental  life  of  man  with  that  of 
animals  and  thus  reach  the  results  of  comparative  psy- 
chology.     He   may   study   the    phenomena    of    groups    of 


630  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

conscious  individuals  and  thus  enter  the  domain  of  social 
psychology.  He  may  investigate  the  mental  characteristics 
of  national  movements  and  thus  develop  what  is  called 
folk-psychology;  or  he  may  study  his  problem  historically 
after  the  manner  of  the  genetic  psychologist.  The  mere 
enumeration  of  standpoints  is  bewildering,  and  it  may  well 
be  asked  what  hope  of  rational  results  is  there  in  this  babel 
of  voices,  each  speaking  its  own  dialect  and  not  infre- 
quently contradicting  its  neighbor.  Well,  it  is  not  our 
purpose  to  attempt  the  reconciliation  of  discordant  voices, 
though  it  could  be  shown  that  much  of  the  inconsistency  is 
more  apparent  than  real.  There  is,  however,  one  thread  of 
continuity  running  through  this  whole  field  of  investigation 
which  it  is  our  aim  here  to  bring  to  light.  The  old  psy- 
chology, which  confined  itself  largely  to  introspection  and 
to  the  consciousness  of  the  single  individual,  was  led  by  this 
standpoint  to  regard  man  too  much  as  an  isolated  and, 
therefore,  an  independent  individual.  It  was  this  isolation 
of  the  individual  that  gave  rise  to  the  most  characteristic 
fault  of  the  eighteenth  century,— a  tendency  to  magnify 
the  power  and  independence  of  the  individual  in  rela- 
tion to  his  environment.  The  individual  was  regarded 
too  much  as  the  maker  and  unmaker  of  civilizations, 
governments  and  religions.  He  was  clothed  with  alto- 
gether fictitious  prerogatives  and  dignities.  The  eighteenth 
century  individual  enjoyed  a  species  of  unlicensed  free- 
dom, therefore,  that  was  checked  and  sobered  by  no 
commensurate  sense  of  responsibility.  Now,  the  tend- 
ency in  the  opposite  direction,  which  not  only  took 
away  this  unchartered  freedom,  but  threatened  the  extinc- 
tion of  every  semblance  of  individual  prerogative,  came 
in  with  the  rise  of  the  modern  historic  spirit  and  method 
which  is  usually  accredited  to  Herder,  and  especially  with 
the  birth  of  the  modern  doctrine  of  evolution.  The  whole 
trend  of  these  movements  is  toward  the  correlation  of  man 
with  his  environment  in  such  a  way  as  to  exhibit  his  life  and 
action  as  largely  a  phenomenon  of  a  larger  race-  or  life- 


chap.  iv.  NATUEE  OF  MAN.  631 

movement.  Moreover,  the  new  psychology  whose  various 
standpoints  we  have  pointed  out  above,  has  arisen  in  re- 
sponse to  these  modern  tendencies  and  its  whole  drift  has 
been  toward  the  incorporation  of  the  activity  and  history  of 
the  individual  consciousness  more  and  more  completely  with 
the  larger  movements  and  history  of  the  race,  and,  in  fact, 
with  the  life-series  as  a  whole.  Let  us  see  how  the  correla- 
tion of  the  different  points  of  view  will  make  this  clear. 
When  the  psychologist  passed  from  the  study  of  the  isolated 
consciousness  to  that  of  brain  or  nerve-accompaniments,  the 
idea  of  a  correlation  of  the  mental  and  physical  began  to 
stand  out  prominently  and  the  conviction  arose  that  to  treat 
the  mental  apart  from  its  nerve-concomitants  would  be  deal- 
ing with  an  abstraction.  This  conviction  was  strengthened 
when  the  problem  was  still  further  objectified  and  the  cor- 
relations of  mental  activity  with  the  corresponding  move- 
ments in  the  outer  world  were  made  an  object  of  study. 
The  conception  of  man  as  a  part  of  a  broader  nature 
and  the  tendency  to  generalize  consciousness  and  to  re- 
gard it  as  the  subjective  or  inner  side  of  all  physical 
phenomena,  began  to  dominate  in  philosophy. 

Up  to  this  point  the  progress  has  been  made  through  suc- 
cessive standpoints  for  the  investigation  of  the  individual 
consciousness  or  organism.  But  now  psychology  achieves 
the  comparative  standpoint  and  begins  to  investigate 
the  correlation  of  human  and  animal  life  with  the  re- 
sult that  the  life  of  man  and  that  of  the  lower  animals 
appear  to  be  all  of  one  type  and  the  individual  consciousness 
seems  to  fade  more  and  more  into  an  illusion.  The  social 
psychologist  steps  in  at  this  juncture  and  shows  that  a 
man  has  not  undisputed  possession  of  the  privacy  of  his 
own  inner  life.  Those  inner  activities  by  which  he  comes 
to  realize  himself  constitute  a  sort  of  undivided  estate  in 
which  his  neighbor  is  a  sharer  with  himself.  Man,  the 
individual,  is  also  a  socius  and,  as  such,  is  in  relations 
of  fundamental  interaction  with  all  the  social  units  of  the 
class  to  which  he  belongs  and  the  society  of  which  he  is  a 


632  DEDUCTIONS.  paet  hi. 

part.  Not  only  so,  but  his  individuality  coalesces  with  that 
of  the  other  group-members  in  such  a  way  as  to  give  rise 
to  a  system  of  general  reactions  which  on  one  side  supply 
the  basis  of  communal  organization  and  action,  while  on  the 
other  they  gradually  build  up  the  sphere  of  nature,  a 
realm  of  relative  indifference  to  the  interests  and  aims  of 
man.  The  individual's  dream  of  independence  thus  ex- 
periences a  rude  awakening  and  he  is  forced  by  the  social 
revelation  to  regard  his  consciousness  as  a  cog  in  the  wheel 
that  grinds  out  social  phenomena. 

The  story,  however,  is  not  yet  complete;  the  most  im- 
portant chapter  of  all,  perhaps,  is  that  of  genetic  psy- 
chology which,  on  the  one  hand,  tells  the  tale  of  evolution 
and  points  out  the  processes  which  incorporate  the  life  of 
man  with  the  life  of  the  world,  while,  on  the  other  hand,  it 
gives  us  the  vision  of  the  genesis  of  our  adult  possessions 
in  the  play-activities  of  the  child.     We  are  able  to  follow 
the  accession  of  elements  stage  by  stage  from  a  beginning 
where    consciousness   can   exist   only   in   germ.     We   may 
comfort  ourselves  in  view  of  this  disillusionment  with  the 
reflection  that  everything  must  be  present  in  germ  in  the 
lump  of  immaturity  we  call  the  infant;  and  this  is  true  in 
a  very  important  sense ;  for,  were  the  course  of  development 
not  largely  predetermined  by  the   original  elements  that 
enter  into  the  infant's  constitution,  we  could  not  be  assured 
that  he  would  develop  into  a  man.     But  even  here  we  come 
upon  very  decided  limits,  for  nothing  can  be  more  certain 
than  that  the  infant  has  not  even  the  germ  of  a  conscience 
or  of  a  sense  of  duty  or  of  the  distinction  between  right 
and  wrong.     Nothing  can  be  more  certain  than  that  the 
infant  is  lacking  in  even  the  rudiments  of  a  religious  con- 
sciousness.    Of  course  we  say  that  the  potentiality  of  these 
is  in  the  infant  while  it  is  not  in  the  young  animal,  and 
this  is  true,"  but  the  word  is  largely  a  cover  for  ignorance. 
We  do  not  like  to  contemplate  the  mystery  of  the  origina- 
tion of  anything,  and  so,  to  escape  from  its  presence,  we 
hide  our  eyes  behind  the  mantle  of  potency.     Dropping 


chap.  iv.  NATUEE  OF  MAN.  633 

figure,  the  great  fact  which  the  study  of  genetic  psychology 
reveals  to  us  is  not  only  the  development  into  maturity  of 
the  powers  with  which  the  child  starts,  but  also,  and  more 
important  still,  the  way  in  which  it  comes  into  possession  of 
powers  which  it  did  not  possess  even  in  germ  at  the  begin- 
ning- of  the  race.  It  shows  us  how  the  child's  mental,  social 
and  religious  nature  is  gradually  constituted  out  of  ele- 
ments, many  of  which  come  to  it  from  its  environment. 

The  conception  of  man  which  the  investigations  of 
psychology  in  all  its  branches  tend  to  develop  may  be 
stated  somewhat  as  follows :  "No  man  liveth  to  himself, 
neither  any  man  dieth  to  himself."  The  individual  is  not 
a  simple  abstract  consciousness  or  mind  somehow  encased 
for  momentary  purposes  in  a  body,  but  he  is  a  bodily  or- 
ganization informed  with  consciousness,  whose  activity  is, 
therefore,  at  the  same  time  physical  and  mental.  Man  as 
such  a  concrete  organism  is  not  in  any  sense  independent 
of  the  physical  world  that  surrounds  him  or  of  the  system 
of  living  things  to  which  he  belongs.  His  auditory  appa- 
ratus is  a  species  of  sounding  board  which  responds  to  the 
sound-waves  of  the  universe  just  as  his  bodily  organism  as 
a  whole  responds  to  stimulations  from  every  quarter. 
The  life  of  the  conscious  individual  is  thus  part  and  parcel 
of  the  life  of  the  world.  In  his  relations  to  the  system  of 
things  with  which  he  is  surrounded  he  is  interwoven  biolog- 
ically with  the  whole  web  of  life,  so  that  he  can  say 
truly,  "Nothing  that  lives  is  alien  to  me."  In  truth 
the  living  currents  of  the  organic  world  flow  through  his 
veins.  And  when  we  take  into  consideration  his  social 
relations  his  individuality  is  again  apparently  lost  in  the 
network  of  the  social  life  of  humanity.  Nowhere  can  he 
find  solid  footing  in  his  world  for  any  kind  of  individual 
independence;  and  when  to  that  we  add  the  revelation  of 
genetic  psychology,  the  whole  solid  world  seems  to  turn 
into  quick-sands  beneath  his  feet.  Nor  does  the  general 
representation  of  psychology  experience  any  mitigation, 
in  this  respect,  from  the  results  of  investigations  in  the 


634  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

broader  field  of  anthropology.  The  vision  of  anthropology 
seems  to  be  that  of  man,  his  ideas  and  institutions,  as  the 
product  of  a  vast  complex  of  general  forces  and  conditions. 
Man  is  a  creature  of  his  environment,  the  victim  of  the 
climatic  and  other  conditions  surrounding  him;  his  facul- 
ties grow  up  in  the  course  of  his  struggle  for  existence, 
and  both  his  intellectual  and  moral  qualities  are  obtained, 
like  the  cunning  of  the  fox,  through  his  persistent  efforts 
to  trap  or  evade  his  enemies.  The  economist  makes  his 
contribution  to  the  tale  by  pointing  out  how  the  individual 
is  caught  and  whirled  around  in  the  mechanism  of  indus- 
trial production  and  competition,  while  the  student  of  his- 
tory and  politics  points  to  the  fact  that  men  are  largely  the 
product  of  institutions  and  that  the  institutions  of  the 
present  are  historic  outgrowths  of  past  conditions. 

We  do  not  say  that  this  story  of  the  reduction  of  the 
individual  to  the  position  of  a  phenomenon  of  universal 
forces  is  the  only  revelation  of  modern  science,  but  it  is 
certainly  its  most  important  and  most  impressive.  There 
is,  it  is  true,  another  side  which  will  form  the  starting- 
point  of  the  second  division  of  this  discusson.  Intro- 
spective psychology,  in  its  voyages  through  the  realm  of 
conscious  activity,  finds  itself  in  a  world  where  the  rela- 
tions are  not  simple  but  where  every  bit  of  consciousness 
seems  to  be  " owned,"  as  Professor  James  puts  it,  and  this 
ownership,  when  we  come  to  construe  it,  resolves  itself  into 
a  common  relation  or  reference  of  all  the  parts  to  some 
common  center.  This  center  in  turn  resolves  itself  into  some 
conscious  court  or  tribunal  which  seems  to  put  forth  the 
claim  of  ownership  and  in  connection  with  which  there 
grows  up  the  more  or  less  vague  apprehension  of  a  central 
self  standing  as  the  unifying  subject  of  all  the  states  of 
consciousness.  In  this  introspective  effort  the  investigator 
is  exploring  what  he  calls  his  own  consciousness,  and  he 
means  by  this,  a  consciousness  that  belongs  to  himself  as  an 
epistemological  subject.  He  knows  that  as  the  subject  of 
experience  his  conscious  self  stands  central  and  that  no 


chap.  iv.  NATUEE  OF  MAN.  635 

element  can  enter  the  precincts  of  experience  in  any  other 
way  than  as  part  of  a  conscious  content  of  which  he  is  the 
subject  and  unifying  center.  This  leads  introspective 
psychology  to  assert  a  central  place  for  self  in  its  con- 
scious world,  although  it  does  not  undertake  full  responsi- 
bility for  the  determination  of  this  self.  In  fact,  without 
denying  the  reality  of  the  self,  it  may  regard  it  as  negligi- 
ble and  may  undertake  the  task  of  building  up  a  psychology 
without  a  soul.  We  do  not  call  this  procedure  in  question 
here.  What  concerns  our  inquiry  is  the  fact  that  the  vi- 
sion of  the  central  self  thus  arrived  at  is  never  lost  but  is 
present  by  implication,  even  in  the  most  objective  investi- 
gation of  psychic  phenomena.  The  notion  of  self  may  not 
play  any  direct  part  at  all  in  the  psychologist's  work;  nay, 
he  may  deliberately  push  it  into  the  background.  But 
it  will  remain  true  that  any  phenomenon  in  order  to  be 
regarded  as  psychic  and  not  purely  physical,  will  take 
on  some  reference  to  consciousness  and  will  be  so  far 
self-owned.  Now  the  point  we  wish  to  put  the  accent  on 
here  is  that  the  vision  of  the  introspective  psychologist  is 
restored  to  its  central  place  by  the  insight  of  the  genetic  psy- 
chologist. Genetic  psychology,  while  it  in  a  sense  completes 
the  story  of  the  individual's  subjection  to  his  environment, 
is  yet  just  as  emphatic  in  its  insistence  that  there  must  be  an 
individual  there  and  that  the  whole  business  of  the  genetic 
process  is  the  evolution  of  selfhood.  Deprive  the  genetic  in- 
vestigator of  his  category  of  the  central  self  and  he  simply 
loses  himself  in  a  mass  of  unrelated  phenomena.  The  great 
burden  of  the  psycho-genetic  story  is  how  the  self  of  the 
child  comes  into  possession  of  all  the  elements  of  its  expe- 
rience and  how  the  adult  self  develops  out  of  the  self  of 
the  child.  When  it  comes  to  the  adult,  the  vitalest  part 
of  its  tale  arises  in  connection  with  the  development  of 
the  individual  self  into  the  socius,— the  self  that  is  the 
subject  and  bearer  of  social  reactions.  Now  it  is  this 
deeper  revelation  of  science  regarding  the  nature  of  man, 
that  we  lay  hold  of  here  as  the  point  of  departure  for  a 


636  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

further  study  of  the  nature  of  man  from  the  standpoint 
of  his  general  experience. 

In  his  general  experience  man  asserts  himself  in  his 
work  as  an  individual,  and  the  problems  we  consider  here 
are  problems,  therefore,  of  individuality  and  include, 
(1)  the  question  of  the  nature  of  what  we  call  our  individ- 
uality, (2)  its  evolution  in  experience,  and  (3)  the  grounds 
of  its  maintenance.  The  term  individual  is  used  of  things 
outside  the  sphere  of  conscious  existence ;  we  call  a  tree  an 
individual.  But  the  whole  meaning  of  the  term  is  de- 
rived from  our  experience  of  our  own  individuality.  In 
what  sense,  then,  do  we  find  ourselves  individuals?  We 
are  not  concerned  here  with  the  origin  of  individuality  but 
rather  with  the  fact.  Man  is  an  individual,  or,  rather, 
realizes  himself  as  an  individual,  in  his  experience  of  him- 
self as  a  self-conscious  and  self -active  agent  in  his  world. 
That  self-consciousness  in  the  light  of  which  his  life  is  self- 
centered  and  by  virtue  of  which  his  conscious  activities 
become  organic  and  relate  themselves  to  a  common  center, 
is  doubtless  the  fundamental  fact  of  individuality,  deter- 
mining its  form  and  type.  Now,  it  may  be  that  when  we 
look  into  our  own  consciousness  we  do  not  find  such  individ- 
uality very  clearly  defined.  We  are  prepared  to  believe 
that  there  are  some  grounds  for  the  complaint  of  Hume 
that  he  can  never  catch  himself  on  the  point  of  any  of  his 
observations.  We  might  ask,  of  course,  whether  it  is 
reasonable  to  expect  to  catch  the  self  on  the  point  of  any 
observation,  inasmuch  as  our  selfhood,  if  it  be  real,  is  not  a 
phenomenon  among  others,  but  something  that  compre- 
hends them  all.  Perhaps  if  the  Humian  would  look,  as  a 
subject  knower,  into  his  own  attitude,  toward  his  ex- 
perience he  would  be  more  successful  in  finding  the  object 
of  his  quest.  At  all  events,  the  self-centered  unity  of 
self-consciousness  is  not  to  be  found  by  exploring  among 
the  happenings  of  consciousness,  but  rather  by  considering 
the  attitude  of  the  active  subject  that  is  putting  the  ques- 
tions, toward  the  content  of  its  consciousness  as  a  whole. 


chap.  iv.  NATURE  OF  MAN.  637 

Viewed  from  this  standpoint  the  fundamental  form  of  in- 
dividuality is  no  longer  doubtful.  If  man  looks  in  the 
right  field  and  in  the  right  way  he  will  have  no  doubtful 
revelation  of  the  unitary  character  of  his  consciousness  or 
of  the  selfhood  which  constitutes  its  central  principle 
of  organization.  Now,  we  call  a  being  capable  of  thus 
relating  its  activities  to  a  common  center,  an  individual. 
When  we  call  a  tree  or  a  plant  an  individual  we  are  read- 
ing into  it,  by  means  of  our  own  experience-analogies,  a 
form  of  being  like  our  own.  We  are  representing  it  as 
involving  some  organizing  principle  by  virtue  of  which  all 
the  parts  and  phenomena  of  the  tree-life  become  organical- 
ly related.  It  is  true  that  we  sometimes  call  inorganic 
bodies  individuals,  but  this  only  happens  when  there  is 
something  in  the  form  of  their  activities  that  suggests  the 
analogy  of  an  organism. 

Our  individuality  means  more,  however,  than  merely 
this  ground-form  of  its  existence.  It  has  content  as  well 
as  form,  and  it  is  the  content  that  is  ordinarily  most  ob- 
trusive in  our  experience.  When  we  speak  of  content,  we 
refer  to  the  quality  of  the  activity  which  takes  on  this  self- 
hood form.  Falling  back  on  that  analysis  which  Vs 
brought  to  light  the  threefold  complexity  of  our  nature 
and  the  fact  that  every  form  which  consciousness  as  a 
whole  may  assume  involves  a  synthesis  of  intellectual, 
emotional  and  volitional  elements  and  that  the  activity 
is  regarded  as  an  exercise  of  thought,  feeling  or  will, 
accordingly  as  one  or  other  of  these  elements  becomes 
dominant  and  explicit ;  what  we  wish  to  emphasize  here 
is  the  fact  that  man's  individuality  asserts  itself  in  that 
agency  which  he  exercises  in  his  efforts  to  overcome 
and  realize  the  world.  His  individuality  expresses  itself 
in  his  agency,  and  therefore  manifests  itself  in  all  his 
interests  and  forms  of  activity.  There  is  an  important 
sense  in  which  individuality  is  the  same  in  all  men.  My  in- 
dividuality and  yours  have  a  common  form ;  as  individuals 
we  are  the  same  kind  of  beings.     Our  activities  express 


638  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

themselves  in  the  common  forms  of  thought,  volition  and 
feeling  and  the  internal  quality  of  these  is  such  that  one 
man  has  as  a  rule  no  difficulty  in  becoming  en  rapport  with 
the  personal  experience  of  another.  But  this  common 
aspect  of  individuality  is  allowed  in  common  usage  to  fall 
into  the  background,  and  when  in  popular  language  we 
speak  of  a  man's  individuality  we  have  special  reference, 
as  a  rule,  to  that  which  is  unique  in  his  manifestation;  to 
that  whch  differentiates  him  from  other  men  and  con- 
stitutes his  own  exclusive  possession.  And  this  one-sided 
use  of  the  term  does  bring  out  clearly  one  element  of  mean- 
ing that  is  vital  to  true  individuality. 

We  have  spoken  in  another  connection  of  that  inner  cita- 
del of  selfhood  which  every  man  enjoys  in  unsharable  seclu- 
sion, and  into  which  his  dearest  friend  cannot  intrude.  This 
is  but  the  metaphysical  aspect  of  that  uniqueness  which  re- 
veals itself  in  the  manifested  lives  of  men.  There  is  enough 
of  the  unique  in  the  outer  life  of  the  most  commonplace  of 
men  to  differentiate  him  from  all  other  men.  The 
individuality  of  Brown  may  not  stand  out  in  any  striking 
contrast  to  that  of  Smith  or  Thompson.  Nevertheless,  it 
will  not  be  found  in  all  respects  identical  with  theirs.  The 
well-known  principle  that  no  two  things  in  the  world  are  ex- 
actly alike  holds  true  in  the  realm  of  individuality.  The  dis- 
tinction of  individuals  maintains  itself  by  the  uniqueness 
of  each  individual,  its  possession  of  that  which  is  not 
sharable  with  others/  This  uniqueness  is  not  altogether, 
or  chiefly,  a  thing  of  outer  manifestation.  Its  most  char- 
acteristic expression  is  an  inner  one  springing  directly  out 
of  a  man's  feeling  that  at  the  center  of  his  being  rests  an 
unsharable  core  of  ejective  individuality.  This  feeling  of 
the  uniqueness  of  his  own  selfhood  gives  rise  to  experiences 
which,  like  that  of  the  seer  in  the  Apocalypse,  are  unutter- 
able. They  are  real  to  him,  perhaps  the  most  real  and 
precious  of  all  his  possessions,  and  that  in  which  his  inmost 
spirit  finds  its  most  satisfying  expression,  and  yet  these 
experiences  will  be  so  unique  as  to  wholly  defy  language  or 


chap.  iv.  NATURE  OF  MAN.  639 

any  of  the  common  molds  of  expression.  They  are  a  wine 
too  precious  for  any  of  the  bottles  of  communication. 
Though  we  may  be  sure,  in  fact,  that  our  neighbor  or 
bosom  friend  has  his  own  unique  experiences,  incommuni- 
cable like  our  own,  this  may  be  a  bond  of  closer  fellowship 
1  ween  us.  The  uniqueness  of  individuality  is,  there- 
fore, essential  to  it  as  its  commonalty,  and  a  concept  that 
would  be  adequate  must  include  both  features.  The  in- 
dividuality of  men  is,  on  the  one  hand,  that  mold  or  type 
of  being  which  constitutes  them  of  a  kind  and  renders  them 
the  bearers  of  a  common  experience,  while  on  the  other 
hand,  it  is  the  barrier  that  separates  them;  the  wall  of 
partition  that  shuts  off  one  man's  inner  life  from  that  of 
another ;  the  veil  that  conceals  the  " Holy  of  Holies"  in  each 
man's  life  from  the  profane  gaze  of  his  fellows. 

We  must  carry  this  vision  of  the  double  nature  of 
individuality  with  us  in  our  effort  to  trace  the  evolution  of 
the  individual  in  experience.  Royce  puts  emphasis  every- 
where on  the  now  well-known  distinction  between  the  two 
worlds  of  description  and  appreciation.  The  former  is  the 
world  of  common  describable  possessions,  while  the  latter 
is  the  world  of  the  unique  which  each  man  feels  and  values 
but  which  he  cannot  make  common  with  his  neighbor. 
Now,  while  in  general  it  seems  to  me  that  these  distinctions 
in  a  sense  overlap  and  much  of  the  content  of  appreciation 
may  also  enter  into  the  world  of  common  describable 
things,  yet  there  is  a  sense  in  which  they  have  a  special 
value  fdr  our  present  topic.  Man  possesses  a  double- 
sided  individuality,  by  virtue  of  which  he  both  enters 
into  the  common  life  of  humanity  and  also  maintains 
his  own  unique  life  untouched  by  the  life  of  others. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  his  common  sharable  nature, 
man  is  a  socius  and  the  bearer  of  social  relations  and 
functions.  By  virtue  of  his  social  nature  the  life  of 
the  individual  enters  into  and  becomes  part  of  the  life  of 
humanity.  At  the  same  time,  however,  and  in  the  vitalest 
connection  with  this  social  feature  of  his  experience,  man 


640  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

is  able  to  maintain  the  nnsharable  sanctity  of  his  own  inner 
ejective  selfhood.  He  is  and  continues  to  develop  into 
a  unique  individual  with  experiences  that  are  his  own  inner 
possession  and  that  he  scrupulously  withholds  from  com- 
mon circulation.  And  the  striking  feature  about  tha 
situation  is  the  fact  that  it  is  here  in  this  field  of  the  unique 
wre  are  to  look  for  the  original  spring  and  criterion 
of  that  which  possesses  worth  or  value.  I  do  not  believe 
that  all  our  worth- judgments,  or  judgments  of  appre- 
ciation, are  unique;  the  distinction  here  again  is  rela- 
tive, and  the  worth- judgment  has  an  important  place 
in  our  world  of  common,  describable  things,  but  it 
seems  to  be  obvious  that  the  original  worth-judgment 
arises  in  the  field  of  the  unique  and  that  the  ultimate 
criterion  of  all  values  will  be  what  it  is  worth,  in  the  last 
analysis,  to  you  or  to  me  in  the  inner  court  of  our  own 
feelings.  There  are,  of  course,  values  that  are  social  and 
common,  and  these  are  apt  to  occupy  the  whole  foreground 
in  our  calculation.  But  after  all  a  social  value  is  one  that 
has  been  agreed  on  by  individuals  as  a  common  good, 
whereas,  if  we  insist  on  analyzing  the  notion  of  common 
good  we  find  that  it  is  a  good  which  is  sharable  by  a  number 
of  individuals  and  that  its  worth  is  resolvable,  ultimately, 
into  terms  of  what  each  of  these  individuals  thinks  of  it. 
In  other  words,  the  notion  of  good  is  resolvable  into  in- 
dividual estimates.  The  same  is  true  of  the  notion  of 
worth  or  value  itself.  The  judgment  of  common  or  social 
value  is  resolvable  into  estimates  of  individual  value.  If 
the  object  in  question  be  socially  valuable,  then  it  will  be 
worth  something  to  John  and  Peter  and  Phillip  and  the 
rest,  and  if  it  has  no  value  for  the  individuals  of  the  group 
it  is  clear  that  it  will  have  no  value  for  the  group.  We  say, 
then,  that  the  individual  estimate  is  the  last  court  of  appeal 
in  determining  values,  and  that  the  question  of  worth  is 
settled,  in  the  last  analysis,  by  the  individual  before  the 
inner  tribunal  of  his  unique  and  unsharable  selfhood. 
It   is   marvelous   that   the   features   of  the   sharable  and 


chap.  iv.  NATUKE  OF  MAN.  641 

common  should  be  so  intimately  bound  up  with  that  which 
is  unsharable  and  unique,  but  it  is  evidently  true  and  it 
supplies  another  striking-  illustration  of  the  central  and 
commanding  place  which  the  individual  holds  in  a  system 
whose  mechanism  so  often  seems  to  fill  the  whole  fore- 
ground and  leave  no  real  office  for  individuality. 

Coming*  back,  then,  to  our  main  task,  which  is  that  of 
tracing  the  evolution  of  man's  individuality  through  the 
stages  of  a  growing  experience,  it  may  be  said  with  truth 
that  the  whole  of  experience  is  a  process  in  which  man 
comes  into  possession  of  himself  and  the  world.  If  we 
approach  the  process  on  its  epistemological  side  we  have  the 
vision  of  a  conscious  organism,  to  which  in  the  initial  stages 
of  its  effort  neither  self  nor  world  has  become  real.  The 
whole  vision  of  knowledge  is  but  a  possibility  of  the  future. 
Through  its  sense-organs  and  the  stress  of  the  internal 
clamor  of  wants  and  interests  which  seek  satisfaction,  it 
wreaks  itself  upon  the  unrealized  realm  of  its  environment 
and  the  play  of  its  activities  leads  to  the  definition  of  the 
objective  in  the  forms  of  space  and  time.  Its  world  of 
presentation,— its  space  and  time  world,— thus  appears  as 
the  theatre  of  its  first  struggles  toward  realization.  But 
the  vision  of  the  space-  and  time-world  does  not  satisfy  it. 
The  movements  of  things  arouse  questions  as  to  what  moves 
them  and  the  awakened  consciousness  puts  the  everlasting 
questions,  How?  and  Why?  These  lead  to  a  looking  be- 
hind the  presentation  for  the  agency  that  brings  it  about. 
In  this,  man  is  guided  dimly  by  the  analogy  of  his  own 
conscious  activity,  and  just  as  the  cat  looks  for  the  object 
behind  the  mirror,  so  he  thinks  to  seize  the  cause  by  looking 
behind  the  phenomenon.  This  brings  to  pass  another  great 
and  epochal  step  in  the  effort  of  world-realization,  and  the 
struggling  consciousness  enters  into  and  develops  the  sphere 
of  dynamic  relations,— the  world  of  cause,  substance  and 
interaction.  We  are  here  following  the  outlines  of  the 
vision  without  troubling  with  the  details.  Now,  the 
dynamic  revelation  answers  our  questions  up  to  a  point, 
41 


642  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

but  as  yet  our  world  has  not  been  completely  realized. 
The  forces  at  work  in  the  djaiamic  sphere  constitute  a 
plurality  and  we  are  pressed  to  know  in  what  way  our 
world  is  to  become  one  world  of  experience.  The  demand 
for  unity,  as  we  have  seen,  springs  largely  from  aesthetic 
roots  and  is  deeply  grounded  in  the  self-consciousness  of 
man.  It  could  not  be  that  a  unitary  consciousness  like 
man's  would  rest  satisfied  with  a  fragmentary  world,  and 
its  protest  against  such  a  world  would  take  mainly  the 
aesthetic  form;  that  is,  it  would  arise  as  an  immediate 
reaction  of  conscious  individuality  in  its  wholeness  against 
that  which  contradicts  and  is  hostile  to  it.  The  last  step 
in  the  evolution  would  thus  be  the  reduction  of  the  objective 
world  to  a  unitary  system  congruous  with  the  demand  of 
our  own  individuality,  in  which  all  the  parts  and  processes 
of  the  world  would  become  subordinated  to  a  co-ordinating 
and  unifying  principle  at  its  heart. 

This  objective  process  is  accompanied;  nay,  it  involves 
as  an  inseparable  aspect,  the  development  of  consciousness 
on  the  subject  side  of  man's  gradual  realization  of  his  own 
selfhood.  There  is  doubtless  the  germ  of  self-reference 
in  the  most  rudimentary  stages  of  consciousness,  for  it  is 
impossible  to  conceive  any  consciousness  as  existing  at  all 
Avithout  having  in  it  the  tendency  to  develop  into  a  con- 
sciousness of  self.  This  being  the  case  the  infant  will  have 
some  form  of  largely  unrealized  selfhood,  perhaps  a  mere 
vague  feeling-sense  of  its  existence,  but  with  the  begin- 
nings of  its  objective  experiences  this  sense  will  begin  to 
develop.  In  connection  with  the  first  representations  of 
its  objective  world  in  space  and  time  it  will  doubtless  begin 
to  realize  itself  as  living  a  conscious  life  in  time,  although 
the  clear  apprehension  of  self  has  not  yet  arisen.  Later 
on,  in  connection  with  its  dynamic  experiences,  its  sense  of 
its  own  agency  in  the  world  will  be  awakened  and  it  will 
come  to  a  more  or  less  clear  apprehension  of  itself  as  a 
practical  agent  in  its  own  world.  No  doubt,  if  we  may  use 
Kant's  phraseology,  it  is  the  practical  ego  that  emerges, 


chap.  iv.  NATUEE  OP  MAN.  643 

first  with  clear  consciousness  under  the  pressure  of  the 
practical  struggles  of  life,  while  the  theoretic  ego,  the 
consciousness  of  selfhood  as  a  unitary  principle  of  life, 
is  a  later  accession.  But  the  full  flower  of  the  realization 
of  self  will  not  come  until  the  aesthetic  demand  for  the 
objective  unity  of  the  world  has  reacted  upon  the  subject 
and  the  return  wave  brings  the  individual  subject  of  expe- 
rience to  a  full  consciousness  of  the  unity  of  its  own  life. 
The  final  stage  in  this  process  of  individual  realization  is 
not  that  of  a  unitary  self  standing  over  against  the  world. 
This  would  involve  a  final  dualism  of  experience.  It  is 
rather  the  consciousness  of  a  being  who  has  realized  the 
world  and  reduced  it  to  content  of  his  own  consciousness. 
The  world  in  this  last  stage  coalesces  with  the  individual 
as  content  of  its  objective  consciousness  and  the  realm  of 
its  objective  life.  The  form  of  individuality  has  been 
completely  realized  in  the  world  which  now  takes  its  place 
as  an  included  part  of  individual  experience.  Now,  it  is 
only  necessary  to  develop  this  representation  somewhat  on 
the  side  of  man's  ethical  and  religious  experience  in  order 
to  complete  the  sketch  of  the  evolution  of  his  individuality. 
Morally,  he  becomes  conscious  of  ideals  that  elevate  the 
plane  of  his  life  and  make  him  the  bearer  of  duties  and 
rights  which  lay  the  foundation,  not  only  for  an  important 
transformation  of  the  life  which  he  lives  in  common  with 
others,  but  which  also  lead,  in  the  realm  of  his  unique 
unsharable  life,  to  the  realization  of  higher  aims  and  higher 
worth  for  the  individual.  Beyond  this  the  religious  con- 
sciousness brings  man  into  a  world  where  his  finite  self 
stands  related  to  a  transcendent  being  who  is  at  the  same 
time  his  other  self,  and  his  religious  experience  thus  cor- 
relates and,  in  a  sense,  incorporates  his  life  with  that  of 
the  infinite. 

This  brings  us  to  the  last  topic  of  the  present  section, 
that  of  the  maintenance  of  man's  individuality  in  the 
world.     The   general  problem  will  involve  two   questions 


644  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

regarding,   (1)   the  form  of  the  process  by  which  the  in- 
dividual maintains  itself  and,   (2)  the  material  conditions 
under  which  it  is  realized.     In  considering  the  form   of 
individual  maintenance  we  turn  our  eyes  inward  and  seek 
to  determine  the  way  in  which  the  self  characteristically 
defines  itself  in  individual  outlines.     In  another  place  we 
have   found  the   distinctive   categories   of  the   self  to  be 
individuality,  self-identity,  personality,  personal  identity.1 
These  categories  answer  the  question  as  to  the  form  in 
which  the  self  becomes  internally  denned,  just  as  the  outer 
world  becomes  denned  under  the  categories  of  space  and 
time  and  cause.     Now  if  we  take  individuality  as  repre- 
senting the  form  which  selfhood  assumes,  the  other  cate- 
gories will  stand  as  representing  the  means  by  which  the 
individual  form  of  existence  maintains  itself  in  the  midst  of 
a  world  of  plurality  and  change.     The  category  of  self- 
identity  means  in  this  connection  simply  that  the  individual 
has  the  power  to  survive  change  and  that  this  power  con- 
sists in  the  ability  to  maintain  sameness  in  and  through 
differences.     How  the  different  can  be  the  same  probably 
no  one  will  ever  be  able  fully  to  conceive.     We  come  upon 
a  much  knottier  question,  however,  when  we  ask  how  there 
could  be  any  differences  in  a  world  that  did  not  continue 
the  same  in  any  respect.     We  see  here  that  our  question 
involves  an  absurdity,  and  that,  however  difficult  it  may  be 
to  conceive  the  nexus  between  identity  and  change,  it  is 
obviously  impossible  that  change  should  exist  where  there 
is  no  identity.     The  form  of  individuality  provides  us  with 
a  type  of  being  in  which  a  principle  of  conservation  is 
involved.     Were  there  no   individuals  in  the   world  it  is 
difficult  to  imagine  how  the  world  would  be  able  to  main- 
tain any  kind  of  identity. 

That  individuality  itself  supplies  the  principle  of  con- 
servation and  maintenance  is  the  doctrine  we  are  here  lay- 

1  Foundations  of  Knowledge.     Part  II.     Chap.  Categories  of  the 
Subject  Consciousness. 


chap.  iv.  NATURE  OF  MAN.  645 

ing  down.1  How  being  could  maintain  itself  in  any  other 
way  is  beyond  our  powers  of  conception.  We  have  only 
one  type  of  self-maintenance  in  our  experience  and  that  is 
supplied  by  our  own  selfhood.  Of  course  we  cannot  say 
absolutely  that  there  is  no  reality  outside  of  and  wholly 
dissimilar  to  the  types  of  our  experience,  but  if  there  be 
such,  it  could  not  be  otherwise  than  wholly  indifferent  to  as  ; 
for  we  have  seen  that  whatever  would  affect  us  in  the 
remotest  way,  in  order  to  do  so,  must  come  within  the 
limits  of  our  experience.  Now  it  is  in  this  maintenance 
of  individual  being  in  and  through  the  changes  of  our 
world  of  experience  that  personality  arises.  Man  persists 
largely  because  he  asserts  himself.  It  is  hard  to  conceive 
the  persistence  of  a  quiescent  nature.  The  nature  that 
maintains  itself  is  one  that  asserts  itself  in  a  life  of  outer 
activities.  We  call  this  outer  activity,  manifestation,  and  a 
man's  personality  is  his  individual  nature  asserting  itself 
in  a  field  of  manifestation.  We  are  not  about  to  enter  on 
any  elaborate  analysis  of  personality  here.  Our  aim  is 
different;  namely,  to  show  how  personality  maintains  its 
identity  and  unity  in  the  midst  of  mutations  and  plurality 
of  forms.  A  man  may  have  as  many  different  forms  of 
personal  manifestation  as  there  are  generic  types  of  activity 
in  his  nature.  He  may  have  a  personality  of  intellect,  a 
personality  of  feeling  and  a  personality  of  will.  There  is 
a  trinity  of  potentialities  in  his  make-up,  although  in  the 
same  individual  one  or  other  of  these  forms  of  personality 
will  usually  dominate.  In  the  same  man  there  may  come 
about  radical  changes  in  the  form  of  his  personality,  so 
that  he  who  has  been  dominantly  a  man  of  thought  and 
reflection  becomes  suddenly  transformed  into  a  man  of  will 
and    action.      Through    these    changes,    however,    his    in- 

1  The  deeper  trend  of  science  is  in  favor  of  the  same  conclusion. 
Science  finds  the  fact  unstable  and  relatively  without  significance 
until  it  has  been  assigned  some  place  in  a  stable  system  in  connec- 
tion with  which  it  has  real  meaning.  We  have  endeavored  to  show 
that  system  itself  can  be  grounded  only  in  an  individual  nature. 


g46  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

dividuality  maintains  itself,  so  that  while  he  may  find 
himself  to  be  a  different  person,  it  is  still  he,  the  self-same 
individual,  who  finds  himself  passing  through  this  expe- 
rience of  difference. 

Not  only  does  the  individual  maintain  itself  through 
changes  of  form,  but  also  through  changes  of  content. 
Most  startling  is  the  fact  that  though  a  man  may  lose 
practically  all  the  content  of  his  consciousness  so  that 
most  of  the  threads  of  continuity  are  snapped,  he  will 
still  be  able  to  restore  himself,  provided  there  be  the 
slenderest  thread  that  is  not  broken.  And  this  continuity 
need  not  be  one  of  time.  We  defy  the  time-gap  every  time 
we  drop  into  unconsciousness  and  return  to  ourselves  again. 
The  lapse  of  time  in  these  gaps  is  a  matter  of  no  moment. 
Whether  we  sleep  a  thousand  years  or  a  single  night  makes 
no  manner  of  difference,  provided,  when  we  awake  we  can 
find  points  of  connection  between  our  present  and  our  past. 
The  continuity  of  the  individual  consciousness  has  nothing 
of  physical  continuity  about  it.  The  physical  solution  of 
continuity  may  be  conspicuous;  but  the  continuity  of  the 
conscious  individual  in  the  sphere  of  content  is  one  that  is 
maintained  by  association  and  memory.  The  prodigal  who 
has  lost  himself  in  the  mere  rush  of  outer  change  comes  to 
himself  through  association  and  memory.  So  if  a  man 
were  in  Hades  where  he  had  lost  all  his  connections  with 
any  former  existence  and  where  his  present  consciousness 
were  filled  to  the  brim  with  the  agony  of  the  moment,  even 
then  the  stirring  of  some  recollection  or  the  clinking  of 
some  chain  of  association  might  start  a  process  of  rein- 
statement that  would  lead  the  lost  soul  to  again  find  itself 
and  regain  its  status  in  God's  universe.  Whether  such 
reinstatements  as  these  ever  occur  as  a  matter  of  fact,  we, 
of  course,  are  unable  to  say.  But  the  point  we  are  contend- 
ing for  here  is  that  no  definable  limit  can  be  set  to  the 
process  of  change,  so  that  we  can  say,  to  go  beyond  this 
point  means  a  solution  of  the  continuity  of  individual 
existence.     The  experience  we  have  is  that  of  the  individual 


chap.  iv.  NATUBE  OF  MAN.  G47 

maintaining  itself  through  all  sorts  of  changes  and  recover- 
ing from  all  sorts  of  lapses,  and  the  fact  that  we  have  and 
in  the  nature  of  the  case  can  have,  no  experience  of  total 
lapses  ought  to  supply  matter  for  reflection  to  anyone  who 
is  disposed  to  be  negatively  dogmatic. 

We  have  been  dealing  with  the  form  of  individual  main- 
tenance up  to  this  point,  and  we  have  seen  how  the  in- 
dividual self  asserts  itself  personally  in  the  world  and  how, 
in  defiance  of  the  laws  of  physical  continuity,  it  is  able  to 
maintain  its  self-identity  in  the  midst  of  the  most  startling 
changes  of  form  and  content.  We  have  yet  to  consider  the 
material  conditions  of  this  maintenance.  If  we  take  man 
as  belonging  to  an  evolution-process,  the  obvious  way  in 
which  he  maintains  himself  in  this  changing  scene  is 
through  his  relation  to  heredity,  on  the  one  hand,  and  to  his 
environment  on  the  other.  There  is  a  tendency,  most  in- 
veterate, in  dealing  with  these  categories  and  especially 
with  that  of  heredity,  to  contemplate  it  on  its  evil  side 
solely,  and  to  regard  man  as  in  some  sense  its  unfortunate 
victim.  And  it  is  no  doubt  true  that  heredity  is  in  many 
instances  a  worker  of  evil  rather  than  of  good.  But  this 
arises  from  the  fact  that  it  is  indifferent  to  moral  dis- 
tinctions and  is  contented  to  build  with  such  brick  as 
may  come  to  its  hand.  Let  us,  however,  take  heredity  as 
it  is,  and  whether  we  adopt  the  Lamarckian  or  the  Weis- 
mannian  view  of  its  method;  in  either  case,  we  will  regard 
it  as  a  conserving  principle.  Heredity  is  not  a  builder,  it 
is  a  conserver.  It  connects  the  individuals  of  the  present 
with  those  of  the  past  and  it  enables  the  present  individuals 
to  maintain  themselves  in  connection  with  the  conditions 
of  the  past  out  of  which  their  development  arose.  Heredity 
is  a  principle  of  transmission  by  means  of  which  the  past 
implants  the  germ  of  itself  in  the  bosom  of  the  present. 
This  germ  may  contain  some  evil,  but  it  will  also  be  a  pur- 
veyor of  good  and  it  will  be  the  means  by  which  the  in- 
dividual of  the  present  maintains  his  organic  identity 
with  the  past.     In  short,  heredity  is  a  kind  of  objective 


648  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

memory,  a  species  of  frozen  association  by  means  of  which 
we,  in  organizing  our  present  experience,  reinstate  and 
incorporate  with  it  also  the  experiences  of  the  past. 
Through  heredity  the  individual  self  becomes,  as  it  were, 
a  race-socius,  and  maintains  itself  as  the  bearer  of  race 
relations  and  characteristics. 

The  other  objective  factor  is  a  builder  and  is  only  indi- 
rectly conserving.  The  environment  is  the  name  for  the  play 
of  all  the  outer  forces  that  are  at  present  affecting  the  in- 
dividual. Some  of  these  forces  are  general  while  others  are 
special.  The  most  general  are  what  we  call  the  forces  and 
agencies  of  nature  which  in  the  form  of  food,  climate,  tem- 
perature, clothing,  vegetable,  mineral  and  animal  surround- 
ings, are  exerting  a  constant  and  very  potent  influence  on 
the  whole  development  of  the  individual.  Man  is  in  some 
sense  what  he  eats  and  in  some  sense  what  he  wears  and  what 
he  associates  with.  Another  class  of  somewhat  less  general 
agencies  are  the  social.  Man  is  an  organic  part  of  the  so- 
ciety to  which  he  belongs,  and  not  only  does  his  environment 
affect  him  as  an  external  force,  but  we  have  seen  how  as  a 
child  developing  toward  adulthood,  the  social  enters  into  his 
inner  make-up  and  he  becomes  a  socius  by  constitution. 
Among  the  general  forces  that  are  at  work  on  the  in- 
dividual must  also  be  counted  the  education-process  he  is 
put  through  in  preparing  him  for  the  functions  of  man- 
hood. A  system  of  education  is  a  summation  of  the  cul- 
ture-forces of  the  past  and  the  present.  It  therefore,  in 
connection  with  inherited  social  institutions,  ideas  and 
customs,  all  of  which  are  preserved  in  some  form  of  art, 
involves  a  principle  of  heredity  to  which  the  name  social 
may  be  applied.  But  on  the  other  hand,  it  is  all  summed 
up  and  included  in  the  environmental  forces  which  play 
on  the  individual,  and  it  is  in  its  totality  a  building  rather 
than  a  conserving  force. 

Now,  it  is  common  also  to  look  only  on  the  evil  aspect  of 
environment,  since  in  practical  life  this  aspect  is  usually 
called  to  our  attention  in  connection  with  thieves  and  the 


chap.  iv.  NATURE  OF  MAN.  G49 

denizens  of  slums;  but  like  heredity,  environmenl  is  indif- 
ferent to  good  or  evil.  Whatever  forces  may  happen  to  exist, 
whether  they  be  good  or  evil,  play  upon  the  individual  and 
influence  his  development.  It  is  through  the  environment 
that  the  general  forces  of  nature  and  the  social  organism 
bring  their  activities  to  bear  on  the  individual  in  the  present, 
while  it  is  through  heredity  that  the  same  agencies  arc  en- 
abled to  influence  the  individual  through  the  channels  of  the 
past. 

If  to  these  general  agencies  we  add  the  special  influences 
which  are  exercised  by  those  unique  forces  that  defy  classi- 
fication,—and  these  may  be  supposed  to  constitute  no 
inconsiderable  factors  in  the  problem,— we  shall  have  com- 
pleted our  representation  of  the  individual  maintaining 
itself  in  connection  with  the  web  of  race-  and  world-expe- 
rience in  which  it  is  involved,  by  means  of  these  great 
objective  agents,  heredity  and  environment.  These,  it  is 
true,  give  rise  to  some  of  the  most  serious  aspects  of  its 
struggle  with  evil,  but  on  the  other  hand  they  are  the  instru- 
ments through  which  man  the  individual  avails  himself  of 
the  experience  of  the  race.  They  also  enable  us  to  complete 
our  vision  of  that  successful  struggle  which  the  individual 
makes  to  maintain  and  conserve  itself  in  the  midst  of  a 
manifold  and  mutable  world.  And  they  also  give  us 
another  demonstration  of  the  fact  that  self-maintenance  in 
this  world  of  ours  is  only  possible  in  an  individual  form. 

In  the  last  section  of  this  discussion  we  shall  consider 
briefly  man's  relation  to  nature  and  to  God.  In  our  re- 
flections in  the  chapter  on  nature,  we  have  taken  the  ground 
that  man  is  to  be  considered  as  a  concrete  organism  and 
that  it  is  in  his  concreteness  as  a  synthesis  of  the  corporeal 
and  the  psychic  that  his  relation  to  nature  is  to  be  de- 
termined. We  simply  reiterate  that  doctrine  here  and  also 
the  conclusions  we  reached  there  as  to  man's  dependence  on 
nature.  We  do  not  recant  here  the  conclusion  reached 
there  that  man  is  a  product  of  nature,  provided  this  con- 
clusion be  considered  in  connection  with  the  doctrine  of 


g50  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

nature  itself,  as  grounded  in  the  divine  purpose.  It  is,  in 
short,  with  a  God-informed  nature  that  we  so  connect  man ; 
a  nature  that  embodies  the  substance  and  method  of  the; 
divine  purpose  in  the  world.  Now,  it  is  in  the  light  of  this 
conclusion  that  I  wish  here  to  consider  man's  relation  to 
nature  from  the  standpoint  of  teleology.  Viewed  from  the 
standpoint  of  efficient  and  mechanical  causation,  man  is 
the  product  of  nature.  We  may  concede  this  and  then  ask 
if  this  be  the  whole  story  and  whether  man  be  a  mere  effect 
of  mechanical  agencies  and  nothing  more.  In  order  to 
deal  with  this  question  let  us  alter  the  point  of  view  and 
regard  nature,  as  the  late  John  Fiske  evidently  regarded  it, 
as  an  evolution-process  that  is  working,  whether  inten- 
tionally or  not  we  do  not  need  to  decide  here,  toward  some 
end  that  will  be  manifested  most  clearly  at  the  point  where 
its  forces  culminate.  We  ask,  What,  in  view  of  the  whole 
process  thus  reviewed,  is  man's  relation  to  it?  Let  us 
retrace  again  in  imagination  the  course  of  nature  from  the 
inorganic  to  the  organic  and  the  sphere  of  living  organisms ; 
through  these  to  the  point  where  consciousness  enters  into 
and  revolutionizes  the  world.  Let  us  follow  the  stages  of 
conscious  life  until  we  reach  that  of  man,  the  primate 
among  animals,  and  let  us  follow  the  evolution  of  his 
physical  organism  in  connection  with  the  development  of 
his  mental,  social,  ethical  and  religious  experience.  Let 
us  follow  man,  himself  a  world  builder,  through  the  stages 
of  his  progress  in  building  up  his  civilization,  fabricating 
his  political,  social,  moral  and  religous  orders  and  institu- 
tions, together  with  the  rich  treasures  of  literatures  and 
arts  and  practical  inventions  and  educational  systems  with 
which  he  enriches  his  new  world.  Let  us  connect  with 
this  the  efforts  he  puts  forth  to  penetrate  the  secrets  of 
nature,  to  overcome  and  harness  her  forces  so  as  to  make 
them  do  his  bidding,  and  the  great  transformations  he  is 
thus  enabled  to  work  in  his  world.  If  this  be  the  vision 
we  have  in  our  minds,  then  our  answer  to  the  question  we 
propounded  will  not  be  unlike  that  of  John  Fiske.     Viewed 


chap.  iv.  NATURE  OF  MAN.  G51 

teleologically,  nature  presents  the  appearance  of  a  process 
including  a  vast  system  of  forces  and  agencies  that  has  for 
its  end  the  origin  and  development  of  man.  We  say  that  it 
presents  this  appearance,  for  we  are  not  here  raising  the 
question  whether  this  result  be  in  any  sense  intended  or 
foreseen  by  nature.  But  the  whole  presents  the  appearance 
of  a  teleological  scheme  and  is  capable  of  teleological  inter- 
pretation. 

If  now  we  abstract  the  natural  from  the  divine,  there 
will  not  be  sufficient  grounds  left  for  asserting  any  kind  of 
design  or  prevision  on  the  part  of  nature.  Nature  without 
God  is  clearly  not  a  teleological  sphere,  and  it  is  very  likely 
that  if  man  were  completely  identified  with  such  a  nature  he 
would  never  be  able  to  rise  out  of  the  clutches  of  fate.  But 
there  is  no  evidence  that  such  a  nature  would  be  capable  of 
producing  such  a  being  as  man.  Why  should  a  purposeless 
system  evolve  as  apparently  its  most  characteristic  product 
a  purposeful  being  ?  Evidently  there  is  something  absurd  in 
the  supposition.  Let  us,  however,  refuse  to  make  the  ab- 
straction and  restore  nature  to  its  dependence  on  the  divine 
as  John  Fiske  did  in  his  thought ;  the  teleological  appearance 
then  becomes  overwhelming  evidence  that  the  world  is  per- 
vaded with  prevision  and  design.  If  nature  itself  is  not, 
when  abstracted  from  the  divine,  a  self-developing  system, 
it  follows  that  its  most  characteristic  and  its  greatest  work, 
the  evolution  of  man,  could  not  be  accomplished  apart  from 
the  divine  purpose  and  agency.  Man  is  the  product  of  na- 
ture but,  in  this  sense;  he  is  the  product  of  the  divine 
energy  and  purpose  working  in  and  through  nature  to  the 
production  of  the  highest  individual  results. 

What  shall  we  say,  then,  in  conclusion  as  to  man 's  rela- 
tion to  God?  We  have  treated  of  this  relation  from  the 
divine  side  in  the  preceding  chapter.  Here  we  approach 
it  from  the  side  of  man  himself.  How  does  the  divine  enter 
into  man's  experience  and  become  a  factor  in  shaping  his 
destiny?  In  the  first  place,  man  becomes  related  to  the 
divine  purpose  in  the  purposes  and  ideals  of  his  own  life. 


G52  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

In  his  moral  and  religions  experience,  in  particular, 
his  finite  purposes  and  aims  become  almost  consciously 
translated  into  ideals  that  transcend  his  finite  horizon. 
His  ideals  of  duty  and  of  moral  good,  for  example,  take  on 
something  of  the  transcendent,  so  that  he  feels  that,  how- 
ever much  he  may  strive  toward  them,  they  are  beyond  the 
limits  of  complete  realization.  Even  more  pronouncedly 
is  this  the  case  in  the  field  of  religious  experience.  Here 
man  is  brought  into  direct  relationship  with  a  transcendent 
being  and  the  activities  of  the  religious  life  may  truly  be 
said  to  be  inspired  directly  by  the  divine  presence.  In 
man's  moral  experience  he  is  brought  into  vital  relations 
with  a  divine  ideal  of  life  and  conduct,  whereas,  in  his 
religious  experience,  he  is  brought  into  more  direct  and 
more  personal  relations  with  the  Divine  Being  himself. 
But  while  man  is  most  clearly  related  to  God  through  his 
moral  and  religious  experience,  it  cannot  be  said  that  there 
is  any  point  in  his  experience  that  is  not  pervaded  with  this 
relation.  Take  the  ordinary  course  of  life  with  the  uncer- 
tain vicissitudes  to  which  all  finite  aims  and  processes  are 
subject,  at  every  point  of  our  lives  bring  us  face  to  face  with 
events  that  present  the  appearance  of  divine  interpositions 
and  divine  overrulings;  our  purposes  are  being  set  aside 
and  a  larger  design  which  we  did  not  foresee  is  appropriat- 
ing the  fruits  of  our  activities.  This  becomes^  more  mani- 
fest if  we  carry  on  our  observations  on  the  social  or  rational 
scale,  where  we  are  constantly  finding  the  foresight  of  the 
wisest  statesman  baffled  by  larger  designs  which  he  has  been 
unconsciously  furthering  in  his  activities.  This  appear- 
ance becomes  translated  into  reality  if  we  include  the  divine 
in  the  sphere  of  experience  and  conceive  his  agency  as 
operating  under  the  category  of  an  all-comprehending  pur- 
pose. Moreover,  if  we  take  into  account  our  relation  with 
nature,  we  find  ourselves  in  the  presence  of  forces  and 
agencies  which  greatly  transcend  our  own.  We  may  put  a 
fatalistic  construction  on  this  aspect  of  our  life.  But  if 
we  regard  nature  as  one  sphere  of  the  divine  and  as  com- 
prehended in  a  divine  purpose,  we  shall  be  able  to  see  how 
through  nature  also  our  lives  are  included  in  this  divine 
order. 


CHAPTER  V. 


FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY. 


In  the  preceding  chapter  we  have  been  been  endeavoring 
to  show  how  man's  nature  is  incorporated  in  the  system  of 
things  so  that  it  seems  from  one  point  of  view  to  be  a  pure 
product  of  the  forces  that  environ  it,  while  from  another 
point  of  view  it  stands  central  in  the  process  of  the  world 
as  an  organic  nucleus,  and,  teleologically,  as  the  final  aim 
and  climax  toward  which  the  system  of  things  has  from  the 
beginning  been  tending.  From  the  one  point  of  view,  man 
seems  the  plaything  of  nature,  while  from  the  other  he 
stands  crowned  as  its  richest  fruitage  and  its  king.  Now 
in  dealing  with  the  problems  of  man's  power  and  destiny 
neither  point  of  view  can  safely  be  ignored.  Experience 
teaches  us  a  double  lesson ;  on  the  one  hand,  that  we  are 
not  kings  of  space,  but  are  largely  products  of  forces  on 
which  we  depend  and  which,  therefore,  limit  and  in  a  sense 
suppress  our  agency ;  on  the  other,  that  we  cannot  abdicate 
our  individuality  but  are  bearers  of  the  prerogatives  and 
responsibilities  of  real  agents  in  the  world.  This  double 
insight  is  one  that  has  not  been  absent  from  the  minds  of 
men,  but  it  was  apprehended  in  its  utmost  clearness  by  Kant 
who  developed  the  doctrine  that  has  prevailed  most  largely 
since  his  time.  Kant  had  a  clear  intuition  of  the  fact  that, 
so  far  as  natural  causes  operate  upon  man,  he  is  not  free 
or  self-determined  but  is  determined,  or  rather  prede- 
termined, by  that  which  is  not  his  own  nature.     In  the 

653 


654  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

sphere  of  natural  causation,  then,  man  has  no  power  of 
initiative  and  his  will  is  not  free  and  self-determined. 
But  Kant  had  also  a  clear  vision  of  another  side  of  man's 
agency,  a  side  that  comes  into  view  most  clearly  in  his 
moral  experience  when  he  becomes  conscious  of  demands 
and  ideals  that  are  inconsistent  with  determination  by 
natural  causation  and  appeal  directly  and,  in  fact,  im- 
periously to  him  as  to  a  being  endowed  with  power  of 
initiative  and  self-determination.  The  situation  was 
diagnosed  with  substantial  correctness  in  the  contention 
that  while  man  is  as  a  matter  of  fact  determined  by  natural 
causes,  as  a  moral  agent  he  must  be  free  or  self-determining, 
and  that,  therefore,  in  the  interests  of  morality  which  are 
the  highest  interests  of  his  being,  he  must  postulate  him- 
self as  the  bearer  of  real  freedom.  This  is  almost  common- 
place to  the  student  of  Kant.  And  yet  a  singular  circum- 
stance about  it  all  is  the  fact  that  not  only  does  Kant,  in 
the  ordinary  run  of  his  discourse,  lapse  into  a  perfectly 
mechanical  way  of  representing  the  situation,  but  in  this 
he  has  been  followed  by  his  most  gifted  disciples.  The 
trouble  lies  in  Kant's  representation  of  the  spheres  of 
natural  causation  and  freedom  as  two  perfectly  co-ordinate 
worlds  which  between  them  halve  man 's  nature  and  agency. 
The  result  is  a  species  of  parallelism  of  opposition,  if  we 
may  use  the  phrase,  in  accordance  with  which  a  man's 
action,  in  the  part  of  it  which  lies  within  the  world  of 
natural  cause,  is  determined,  while  in  the  part  of  it  that 
lies  within  the  sphere  of  ethical  motives,  it  is  free  and  self- 
determining.  In  view  of  this  situation  I  may  say  that 
down  here  in  this  realm  of  nature  where  I  mostly  find 
myself,  I  am  not  free  but  determined,  whereas,  up  there 
where  I  only  get  once  in  a  while,  my  freedom  is  secure  and 
I  become  a  free  agent.  In  view  of  a  situation  so  exasperat- 
ing, one  can  have  a  degree  of  sympathy  with  the  mental 
state  of  a  friend  who  irreverently  damned  such  freedom  in 
round  terms. 

Now,  the  corrective  of  this  Kantian  dilemma,  which 


chap.  v.  FKEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  655 

survives  in  some  of  our  best  contemporary  thought,  will  be 
found,  I  think,  in  a  less  mechanical  mode  of  representation. 
The  Kantian  does  get  at  the  essentials  of  the  situation. 
There  is  this  sphere  of  natural  causation  to  which  I  am 
amenable  and  there  is  that  of  ethical  freedom  which  is 
also  my  heritage.  But  instead  of  supposing  that  these 
divide  our  agency  into  two  hemispheres,  in  one  of  which  it 
is  bound  while  in  the  other  it  is  free,  and  that  these  are 
perfectly  co-ordinate  facts,  let  us  change  our  figure  and 
represent  our  experience,  as  it  manifestly  is,  as  a  process, 
a  progressive  movement  toward  some  goal  that  represents 
its  completion.  In  a  process  or  evolution  there  is  always 
a  pou  sto  or  point  of  departure  for  the  movement  and  there 
is  a  goal  or  ideal  in  relation  to  which  it  is  going  on  to  com- 
plete or  realize  itself.  And  there  is  a  true  sense  in  which 
this  point  of  departure  is  found  not  simply  at  the  beginning 
of  the  race  but  at  every  stage  of  it,  as  the  point  of  reaction 
of  an  effort  upon  its  base.  There  is  also  a  corresponding 
sense  in  which  the  ideal  goal  is  not  simply  at  the  end  of  the 
race,  but  in  every  stage  of  it  as  the  movement  of  forward 
impulse  and  realization.  The  point  of  departure  and  the 
goal  thus  enter  constitutionally  into  the  process  in  all  its 
stages  and  determine  its  real  nature.  If,  now,  we  translate 
the  Kantian  hemispheres  of  agency  into  terms  of  this  latter 
relation  we  arrive  at  the  conception  of  a  much  more  real 
situation  and  one  that  our  experience  renders  intelligible. 
There  will  still  be  a  sense  in  which  our  action  is  determined 
and  a  sense  in  which  it  is  free,  but  the  moments  here  will  be 
in  normal  relation.  We  shall  be  helped  by  this  mode  of  rep- 
resentation to  see  that  the  sphere  of  determination  in  our 
action  practically  includes  our  whole  equipment.  The  run- 
ner at  the  point  where  the  race  begins  is  the  result  of  a  lot 
of  causes  which  have  brought  him  up  to  his  present  state  of 
efficiency,  without  which  he  would  not  be  in  the  race.  This 
is  the  sphere  of  natural  determination.  The  ground  he 
stands  on,  his  attitude  of  readiness  to  move  at  the  signal, 
as  well  as  his  whole  present  state  of  training,  all  belong 


656  DEDUCTIONS.  tart  hi. 

to  this  category.  The  stake  he  is  to  reach,  the  plaudits  and 
the  material  prize,  these  also  contribute  to  the  natural 
conditions  of  his  action.  But  with  all  these  and  even  with 
the  signal  to  start,  the  runner  might  stand  there  forever, 
like  the  Greek  athlete  in  bronze,  were  it  not  for  the  pres- 
sure of  an  ideal  purpose  in  the  runner's  consciousness,  his 
clear  apprehension  of  what  is  not  but  what  is  to  be,  and  of 
what  is  to  be  because  he  has  ideally  made  it  so.  There  is 
this  moment  of  the  self  leaping  forward  to  the  realiza- 
tion of  an  ideal  self  qualified  with  an  experience  to  be 
realized.  It  is  to  this  part  that  the  signal  directly  appeals 
and  it  is  this  ideal  purpose  that  takes  the  initiative  and 
loosens  the  tense  muscular  activities  which  carry  him  to  the 


Returning  with  the  fruit  of  this  illustration  to  the  main 
question,  what  we  wish  to  maintain  here  is  that  the  sphere 
of  natural  determination  is  related  to  that  of  freedom  as 
that  which  is  to  that  which  is  to  be.  Freedom  is  not 
a  thing  that  can  be  achieved  once  for  all  and  held  as  a 
permanent  possession  like  a  demonstrated  proposition  in 
geometry.  He  who  sits  down  to  enjoy  his  freedom  loses 
it.  The  sphere  of  freedom  is  that  of  ideal  purpose,  through 
which  the  present  fact,  my  naturally  determined  status, 
becomes  the  basis  and  point  of  departure  for  the  initiative 
of  free  agency,  that  is,  for  the  initiative  of  an  ideal 
causality  that  is  motived  by  the  what  is  to  be,  by  that  which 
in  that  purpose  stands  ideally  realized.  It  is  not  true, 
then,  that  down  here  where  I  am  for  the  most  part  I  am 
bound  by  natural  causation,  while  up  where  I  find  myself 
"every  little  while,"  as  our  neighbor,  The  Philistine, 
would  phrase  it,  I  become  a  free  being.  Rather,  my  free- 
dom as  well  as  my  servitude  is  included  in  every  moment 
of  my  conscious  life,  and  the  respect  in  which  I  am  de- 
termined by  natural  causation  stands  in  my  experience  as 
the  indispensable  point  of  departure  for  the  respect  in 
which  I  am  free  and  self-determined.  If  a  man  were  not 
the  bearer  of  this  power  of  ideal  purpose  through  which  he 


chap.v.  FKEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  (557 

anticipates  experience  not  already  his,  he  would  not  be  a 
subject  of  freedom.  But  then  his  whole  life  would  lose  its 
significance  and  he  would  virtually  lapse  into  the  bosom 
of  inanimate  nature. 

We  go  on,  then,  to  consider  man's  power  (1)  in  his  rela- 
tion to  nature,  (2)  in  his  relation  to  God.  In  both  rela- 
tions man's  power  has  been  debatable  and  has  often  been 
denied,  the  antagonist  being,  on  the  one  hand,  the  material- 
istic determinist,  on  the  other,  the  fatalistic  theologian. 
In  dealing  with  the  problem  of  man's  relation  to  nature 
the  materialistic  determinist  points  to  the  fact  that  has 
already  become  familiar;  namely,  that  man  is  in  an  im- 
portant sense  a  product  of  nature.  The  determinist  of 
this  species  is  usually  an  evolutionist  and  is  impressed  with 
the  conviction  that  man  is  a  pure  product,  in  fact  a  mere 
plaything,  of  this  process.  He  is  also  impressed  with  the 
aspect  of  natural  determination  to  which  we  have  called 
attention  above.  As  a  rule  he  is  a  deep  student  of  biology 
and  a  physiologist  who  has  made  a  specialty  of  the  nervous 
conditions  of  conscious  action.  He  has  perhaps  taken  up 
the  pathological  side  of  the  investigation  and  has  learned 
how  closely  abnormal  states  of  mind  are  related  to  abnormal 
physical  conditions.  On  the  social  side  he  has  been  a 
student  of  criminology  and  has  learned  how  criminality 
is  so  largely  a  matter  of  the  genealogical  tree.  Little 
wonder,  then,  that  he  has  become  a  materialistic  determin- 
ist, and  is  disposed  to  deny  freedom  with  a  degree  of  dog- 
matic impatience. 

Now,  there  is  no  disposition  here  to  challenge  either 
the  truth  or  the  importance  of  this  point  of  view.  Those 
philanthropists  who  presume  to  ignore  heredity,  for 
example,  in  dealing  with  the  products  of  the  evil  side 
of  our  civilization,  will  find  themselves  as  far  astray 
as  the  jurist  who  ignores  the  close  dependence  of  actions, 
even  in  their  moral  aspects,  on  physical  conditions  and 
essays  to  treat  all  abnormal  actions  as  crimes.     The  truth 

that  the  materialistic  determinist  brings  to  us  is  vitally 
42 


658  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

important,  though  what  we  claim  here  is  that  it  does 
not  require  that  we  become  materialistic  determinists. 
What  we  claim  is  that  the  believer  in  freedom  is  able  to 
accept  the  whole  budget  and  deal  with  it  more  intelligently 
than  does  the  materialistic  determinist.  What,  we  may 
ask,  is  the  characteristic  fault  of  the  latter?  Manifestly 
a  tendency  to  a  low  if  not  a  contemptuous  view  of  human 
nature.  He  sees  man  as  a  creature  who  is  run  by  the 
physical  forces  that  enter  into  his  make-up,  whose  whole 
character  will  be  changed  by  a  lesion  in  some  organ  of  his 
brain,  in  whom  a  particle  of  matter  lodged  in  some  crevice 
of  his  nervous  organism  will  let  loose  the  imprisoned  crim- 
inal impulses ;  a  creature  whose  whole  life-activity  has  been 
predetermined  by  the  vicious  practices  of  his  ancestors. 

His  case  seems  to  be  invincible  and  we  feel  like  mere  in- 
fants in  the  hands  of  his  merciless  logic.  We  are  only 
dissatisfied  when  this  is  put  forward  as  the  whole  truth 
about  man,  and  as  the  best  that  can  be  said  about  his 
agency.  And  this  dissatisfaction  is  not  completely  allayed 
when  we  remember  that  what  the  materialistic  determinist 
delights  to  show  up  on  its  evil  side  has  also  its  beneficent 
aspect  and  is,  in  fact,  as  efficient  a  conserver  of  good  as  it 
is  of  evil.  Our  dissatisfaction  voices  itself  in  the  contention 
that  there  is  another  side  of  man's  nature  which  the  lance 
of  the  surgeon  does  not  penetrate.  The  philanthropist 
and  the  home  missionary  have  also  their  insight  into  life 
and  their  story  to  tell,  and  this  story  will  be  valuable  in 
proportion  as  the  philanthropist  or  the  missionary  be  a 
wide-awake,  sensible  man  ready  to  look  at  situations  as 
they  really  are.  Let  our  college  settlements  in  the  slums 
of  our  large  cities  and  the  efforts  which  our  most  sensible 
home  missionaries  are  putting  forth  to  reform  the  weak 
places  in  our  civilization  speak  from  their  own  character- 
istic point  of  view  and  in  the  light  of  results  that  are 
actually  being  accomplished.  With  the  terrible  vision  of 
man's  enslavement  to  his  evil  heredity  and  the  vicious 
environment  in  which  he  is  bound,  there  can  be  no  dis- 


chap.v.  FKEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  659 

position  to  deny  the  truth  in  the  doctrine  of  the  material- 
istic determinist,  nor  to  underrate  the  importance  of  a 
revolution  of  the  victim's  external  conditions.  The  thought- 
ful man  follows  with  keenest  sympathy  the  heroic  struggles 
of  Mr.  Jacob  Riis  to  turn  Mulberry  Bend  into  a  park  and 
to  restore  the  playground  to  the  children.  And  he  is 
likely  to  find  the  final  ground  for  his  hope  for  humanity 
where  Mr.  Riis  himself  finds  it,  in  faith  in  man's  ability  to 
rise  out  of  the  most  hopeless  conditions  into  a  higher 
spiritual  heritage.  Mr.  Riis  has  the  vision  which  a  greater 
than  he  once  had  of  man  as  a  son  of  God  and  with  the  in- 
extinguishable capacity  in  him  to  struggle  up  toward  the 
realization  of  that  divine  sonship.  Were  man  a  being 
who  was  a  complete  victim  of  his  circumstances  and  who  re- 
quired to  be  lifted  bodily  out  of  the  state  he  was  in  into  a 
higher  plane,  by  the  operation  of  agencies  that  were  external 
to  him,  he  would  then  deserve  the  low  opinion  of  the  mate- 
rialistic determinist.  But  then  the  college  settlements  and 
the  home  missionaries  would  have  no  vocation  and  our 
churches  as  regenerative  agencies  might  close  their  doors. 
It  is  because  man,  through  his  divine  faculty  of  forming 
ideal  purposes,  has  the  power  of  initiative  amid  his  cir- 
cumstances, and  has  the  capacity  for  responding  to  spirit- 
ual motives  and  appeals,  that  there  is  any  hope  for  him  at 
all  in  this  world.  All  help  is,  in  the  last  analysis,  con- 
ditioned on  self-help,  and  (we  hope  it  can  be  said  without 
irreverence)  the  power  of  the  divine  to  help  the  human 
depends  in  an  important  sense  on  the  power  of  self-help  in 
the  human. 

We  have  only  to  put  the  two  solutions  together,— that 
of  the  materialistic  determinist  and  that  of  the  missionary 
philanthropist,— in  order  to  have  again  presented  the  dual 
aspects  of  man's  life.  There  is  a  sphere  in  which  we  are 
the  products  of  nature  and,  if  you  like  to  put  it  that  way, 
the  victims  of  the  play  of  natural  forces,— a  sphere  in 
which  we  have  no  initiative  and  no  power  but  are  what  our 
heredities  and  environments  have  made  us.     But  this  is 


660  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

only  one  aspect  of  the  case.  In  the  midst  of  these  con- 
ditions which  have  determined  us  and  which  contrive  to  do 
so  to  the  end  of  the  story,  man  is  also  the  bearer  of  the 
power  to  conceive  ideal  purposes  and  to  initiate  through 
them  courses  of  action  that  lead  to  their  realization.  This 
capacity  is  constitutional  to  him  as  a  human  being,  and  its 
elimination  would  be  destructive  of  his  agency.  Let  us, 
then,  define  freedom  as  man's  power  to  conceive  ideal  pur- 
poses and  to  put  forth  activities  for  their  realization,1  and 
we  shall  have  attained  a  notion  of  freedom  that  will  not 
only  fit  in  with  our  servitude,  so  far  as  it  is  real,  but  will 
also  harmonize  with  the  testimony  of  our  own  experience. 
The  appeal  to  consciousness  as  a  witness  to  our  freedom, 
though  of  very  ancient  date,  has  in  recent  times  fallen 
into  disrepute,  and  this  is,  in  part  at  least,  due  to  the  fact 
that  consciousness  was  asked  to  testify  to  more  than  it 
knew,— to  that,  in  fact,  which  was  not  borne  out  by  the 
voice  of  experience.  What  consciousness  does  bear  wit- 
ness to  is  man's  possession  of  this  imperishable  capacity 
for  initiative  in  connection  with  his  ideal  purposes.  Now, 
consciousness  may  testify  to  this  while  also  bearing  witness 
to  the  fact  that  we.  are  largely  determined  by  natural 
causes.  We  are  conscious  of  our  present  status,  of  what 
we  are,  as  well  as  of  our  ideal  purposes,  of  what  we  aspire 
to  and  resolve  to  become.  The  process  of  realization  which 
involves  both  moments  is  one  within  consciousness,  and 
consciousness  no  more  testifies  to  absolute  and  unqualified 
freedom  than  it  does  to  unmitigated  slavery  and  determin- 
ation by  natural  causes.  Our  consciousness,  when  we  in- 
terpret it  rightly,  testifies  to  a  double  fact.  It  recognizes 
our  dependence  on  what  we  are,  but  it  also  testifies  to  our 

1  We  state  the  case  of  freedom  broadly  here  and  purposely  so  in 
view  of  the  fact  that  in  former  discussions  we  have  limited  the 
proof  of  freedom  to  ethical  choice,  in  which  man  is  clearly  a  vera 
causa.  We  purposely  limited  the  claim  to  its  strongest  case,  while 
believing  all  along  that  all  reflective  choice  that  is  made  in  view  of 
an  ideal  purpose  is  free. 


CHAP.V.  FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  GG1 

ability  to  conceive  in  the  form  of  ideal  purpose  and  to 
realize  what  we  are  not. 

We  do  not  wish,  however,  to  slur  over  or  conceal  the 
dark  negative  side  of  this  picture.  There  is  the  negative 
sphere  of  unfreedom  and  slavery,  and  man  is  constantly 
lapsing  into  this  by  inaction  as  well  as  forging  its  chains 
by  evil  action.  No  man  is  free  in  any  static  sense.  ^Ye 
become  free  by  putting  forth  teleological  effort  toward  the 
realization  of  ideals.  Inaction  is  the  lapsing  of  these  ideals 
and  the  efforts  for  their  realization.  He  that  says  he  is 
free  but  does  not  the  works  of  freedom  is  a  liar  and  the 
truth  is  not  in  him.  We  prove  our  freedom  by  achieving 
it,  and  there  is  no  other  proof  outside  of  the  testimony  of 
a  living  experience.  On  the  other  hand,  evil  activity  will 
result  in  the  riveting  of  the  chains  of  slavery.  I  mean 
here  by  evil  activity,  that  which  is  unethical,  rather  than 
the  positively  immoral  and  bad,  the  yielding  to  the  unideal 
forces  that  play  upon  our  wills  and  seek  to  determine  us  in 
a  fatalistic  way.  We  are  reduced  to  slavery  whether  we 
be  the  victims  of  strong  drink  or  of  the  ultra-emotional 
in  religion.  The  evil  forces  may  come  to  dominate  us  more 
and  more  until  we  reach  a  stage  where  we  have  practically 
lost  our  ability  to  be  free.  It  follows  logically,  as  well  as 
experientially,  that  a  man  may  forfeit  his  freedom  by 
inaction;  he  may  reach  a  point  where,  so  far  as  human 
agencies  are  concerned,  he  is  past  regeneration  simply 
because  he  has,  to  all  appearances  at  least,  lost  that  power 
of  self-initiative  on  which  all  helpfulness  is  conditioned. 
The  divine  helpfulness  may  rebuke  our  short-sightedness 
by  coming  to  the  aid  of  such  a  one  and  thereby  proving 
that  the  germ  of  freedom  still  smouldered,  but  the  law 
holds  good,  notwithstanding,  that  freedom  is  the  pearl  of 
great  price  in  our  nature  which  by  neglect  or  abuse  may  be 
lost. 

AVe  thus  come  to  the  final  problem  of  freedom;  namely, 
that  of  man's  power  in  relation  to  God.  Here  we  are 
confronted   with  the   companion   of  the   materialistic   de- 


662  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

terminist,  the  fatalistic  theologian,  who  has  become  so 
impressed  with  the  sense  of  the  divine  agency  in  the  world, 
and  especially  with  that  phase  of  it  which  he  calls  the 
divine  sovereignty,  that  he  can  see  no  place  left  for  real 
human  agency.  This  was  the  fault  of  the  great  Edwards 
and  it  is  the  characteristic  fault  everywhere  of  the  type 
of  mind  that  is  liable  to  become  what  is  called  God-intoxi- 
cated. I  suppose  we  have  here  the  reason  why  Spinoza 
is  called  the  God-intoxicated  man,  in  that  he  falls  into  the 
characteristic  attitude  of  seeing  the  divine  everywhere  in  a 
sense  that  is  inconsistent  with  the  reality  of  any  other 
agency.  In  Spinoza's  case,  however,  it  was  an  intoxication 
of  thought  rather  than  one  of  feeling,  while  in  the  case  of 
Edwards  and  the  mediaeval  mystics  it  is  largely  an  intoxi- 
cation of  feeling.1  What  the  God-intoxicated  man  realizes 
is  the  absoluteness  and  the  all-inclusiveness  of  the  divine 
agency  and  this  vision  so  impresses  him  that,  in  magnifying 
it,  he  practically  annihilates  the  free  agency  of  man.  Now 
the  fault  of  Spinoza  and  the  fatalistic  theologians  does  not 
consist  in  the  fallacy  of  their  intuition.  We  owe  them  an 
imperishable  debt  for  the  clear  revelation  they  have  given 
us  of  the  absoluteness  of  the  divine  agency  and  its  all- 
pervading  and  all-controlling  relation  to  the  world.  The 
characteristic  fault  of  these  thinkers  springs  directly  out 
of  their  method  which  starts  with  an  a  priori  conception  of 
God  and  attempts  to  deduce  from  this  the  whole  doctrine  of 
God's  relation  to  the  world  and  man.  This  is  a  reversal 
of  the  method  of  experience  in  which  man,  in  his  efforts 
to  realize  the  world  and  in  the  evolution  of  his  own  con- 
sciousness, finds  the  place  of  the  divine  in  his  life  and 
through  the  idea  of  God  thus  achieved  is  able  to  include 

1 1  do  not  mean  to  say  that  Edwards  was  dominately  an  emotion- 
alist. He  was  one  of  the  keenest  thinkers  the  world  has  ever  seen. 
At  the  same  time  it  is  possible  in  Edward's  case  to  trace  the  motive 
of  his  most  penetrating  thought  back  to  mystical  grounds.  The 
dialectic  of  Edwards  is  keenest  when  his  emotions  are  at  a  white 
heat. 


chap.v.  FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  663 

the  notion  of  the  infinite  in  that  of  experience.  But  a 
necessary  presupposition  of  this  method  is  the  reality  of 
man's  own  experience  and  the  processes  through  which  he 
has  been  able  to  reach  the  divine.  Man  cannot  deny  the 
reality  of  his  own  agency,  then,  without  reducing  all  that 
it  enables  him  to  discover,  to  illusion,  and  he  is  thus  com- 
mitted to  the  maintenance  of  his  own  reality.  It  follows 
that  a  deductive  concept  of  God  which  necessitates  the 
suppression  of  man's  agency  as  unreal,  can  find  no  solid 
support  in  experience.  The  thinker  who  attempts  to  treat 
such  a  concept  as  an  absolute  starting-point  in  his  thought 
is  likely  to  share  the  fate  of  the  woodman  who  cuts  away 
the  branch  on  which  he  is  standing. 

What,  then,  is  the  truer  way  of  dealing  with  the  problem 
of  man 's  freedom  in  relation  to  the  divine  ?  In  the  first  place, 
man  is  conscious  of  his  own  agency,  that  he  is  a  being  capa- 
ble of  conceiving  ideal  purposes  and  of  putting  forth  efforts 
to  realize  them.  We  saw  that  this  capacity  constitutes  man 's 
distinctive  claim  to  freedom  in  his  relation  to  nature.  The 
reasoning  in  this  case  is  that,  whether  nature  be  capable  of 
acting  in  a  purposive  way  or  not,  man  possesses  this  capacity 
and  is,  therefore,  a  free  agent.  Now  from  data  in  expe- 
rience which  we  do  not  need  to  recount  here,  we  reach  the 
conception  of  God  as  a  purposive  being  and  as  related  in  a 
grounding  way  to  the  whole  world  of  existence,  including 
man  himself.  We  have,  then,  the  vision  of  a  world  com- 
posed on  one  side,  of  a  multitude  of  finite  purposive  agents, 
while  on  the  other  there  is  one  infinite  and  all-compre- 
hending purpose  in  which  this  finite  plurality  is  grounded. 
The  vital  nerve  of  the  problem  arises  here  in  the  relation  of 
the  finite  purpose  to  the  infinite  grounding  purpose  of  the 
absolute.  Let  us  take  an  analogy  from  the  relation  of  man 
to  nature.  In  the  sense  in  which  man  is  a  product  of 
nature  he  may  also  be  said  to  be  grounded  in  nature  and 
comprehended  in  its  processes.  This  is  a  direct  relation 
and  is  constitutive  of  man's  present  nature.  But  we  have 
seen  that  this  does  not  militate  against  his  freedom,  but 


fifi4  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

rather  supplies  the  point  of  departure  for  the  exercise  of 
that  freedom.  Man  is  a  free  agent,  not  in  spite  of  his 
dependence  on  nature,  but  rather  in  connection  with  that 
dependence,  his  real  freedom  growing  directly  out  of  it. 
Now,  we  do  not  know  whether  nature  be  purposive  or  not, 
but  we  know  that  God  is  a  purposive  agent  and  that  we 
finite  beings  are  related  to  him  directly  in  the  purpose  he 
entertains  toward  us.  Is  there  anything  in  the  notion  of 
purposive  agency  that  necessarily  militates  against  the  free- 
dom of  the  finite  agent  by  subjecting  it  to  direct  divine  de- 
termination ?  We  have  seen  that  man 's  organism  is  directly 
constituted  by  nature  and  yet  that  this  does  not  destroy  his 
free  agency.  How  could  the  divine  purpose  operate  upon 
man  directly?  The  only  way  we  can  conceive  is  in  that 
initial  activity  in  which  the  existent,  what  we  call  the  self, 
is  posited  or  instituted,  an  activity  which  we  can  describe 
but  cannot  penetrate.  It  is  by  virtue  of  this  act  of  the 
divine  agency  that  man  is,  and  we  have  only,  like  the  old 
theologians,  to  conceive  this  activity  as  representing  a 
permanent  connection  of  the  divine  with  the  creature  in 
order  to  identify,  as  they  did,  the  functions  of  origination 
and  maintenance.  It  is  then  by  this  direct  relation  that 
the  finite  is  maintained  in  being.  Now,  this  divine  activity 
no  doubt  institutes  that  germ  of  individuality  which 
eventually  unfolds  into  selfhood  and  the  question  which  we 
meet  here  is  whether  or  not  we  are  shut  up  to  the  pan- 
theistic doctrine  that  in  this  activity  God  is  simply  insti- 
tuting a  finite  mode  of  asserting  his  own  agency. 

To  such  an  answer  there  are  two  objections.  First,  it  is 
an  example  of  that  method  of  a  priori  deduction  which  at- 
tempts to  override  experience,  from  some  supposititious 
standpoint  of  absoluteness  outside.  But,  second,  we  have 
found  in  our  analysis  of  the  situation  which  arises  in  the  so- 
cial and  religious  consciousness,  that  selfhood  involves  a  core 
of  perfectly  unique,  unsharable  being,  an  inner  citadel  of 
self-assertiveness,  the  invasion  of  which  would  suppress  our 
individual  standpoint  completely.    We  have  seen  that  this  is 


CHAP.V.  FKEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  6G5 

a  feature  of  the  relation  which  cannot  be  suppressed  even  in 
the  closest  approaches  of  the  finite  soul  to  God  because  it 
would  involve  the  disappearance  of  the  self -term  of  the  rela- 
tion and  therefore  its  annihilation.  The  soul,  in  order  to  be 
a  real  agent  in  its  approach  to  God,  must  maintain  this 
inner  core  of  self-assertiveness  and  we  may  suppose  that  it 
is  just  this  that  is  immediately  sustained  in  being  by  the 
divine  agency,  and  that  creation,  whatever  it  may  signify 
in  mode,  means  just  this  in  the  content  which  it  realizes. 
We  could  not  conceive  otherwise  how  any  new  being  could 
come  into  existence.  Instead,  then,  of  drawing  the  pan- 
theistic inference,  we  shall,  if  guided  by  the  deeper  analogies 
of  experience,  come  to  the  conclusion  that  pantheism  is  a 
misreading  of  the  situation  and  that  the  real  relation  of 
the  divine  to  the  finite  human  is  one  that  is  not  only  con- 
sonant with  the  real  individuality  of  the  finite,  but  is  in 
fact  constitutive  of  that  very  individuality. 

The  direct  relation  of  God  to  man  is  to  be  conceived, 
then,  as  one  that  is  constitutive  of  real  individuality.  Man 
must  be  more  than  a  mere  finite  mode  of  the  divine  purpose 
or  he  cannot  be  said  to  possess  any  true  reality.  This 
conclusion  does  not,  however,  close  the  door  against  the 
possibility  that  man  may  be  in  a  very  real  sense  a  finite 
mode  of  the  divine.  In  the  very  constitutional  type  of  his 
being  he  is  a  finitation,  so  to  speak,  of  that  ideal  selfhood 
which  we  conceive  God  to  be.  In  man  God  is  instituting 
finite  replications  of  himself,  natures  which  find  their  ideals 
of  life  and  good  realized  in  God  and  which  are  bearers, 
therefore,  of  a  divine  destiny.  It  is  not  altogether  false, 
but  only  an  abuse  of  analogy,  to  characterize  these  finite 
selves  as  ' '  bits  of  the  absolute. ' '  If  the  phrase  be  taken  as 
loosely  symbolic  and  not  strictly  scientific  in  its  meaning, 
it  may  be  adopted  as  serving  a  good  purpose ;  for  there  is  a 
vital  sense  in  which  our  lives  are  continuous  with  the  life 
of  God.  A  rigid  interpretation  of  the  phrase  would  lead, 
however,  to  a  violation  of  the  deepest  analogies  of  our  expe- 
rience.    God  realizes  his  purpose  in  the  institution  of  these 


66(3  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

finite  replications  of  himself,  but  his  purpose,  if  it  be 
adjudged  from  the  point  of  view  of  experience  itself  and 
not  from  some  outside  standpoint  of  absoluteness,  con- 
templates in  these  replicates  not  mere  modes  of  himself, 
but  unique  centers  of  real  individual  agency.  There  is 
nothing,  then,  in  the  direct  relation  of  man  to  the  divine 
purpose  that  militates  against  his  free  agency.  By  virtue 
of  that  relation  man  is  able  to  become  a  real  agent  in  the 
world. 

What  can  we  say,  then,  of  man's  less  direct  relation  to 
the  divine  purpose?  Can  we  say  that  God  is  absolute 
sovereign  in  his  world  and  that  man  is  yet  a  free  agent? 
This  has  always  been  a  burning  question  in  theology  and 
the  wisest  theologians  have  always  maintained,  even  while 
declining  to  undertake  the  burden  of  proof,  that  the  divine 
sovereignty  is  consistent  with  human  freedom.  It  may  be 
admitted  that  on  first  blush  appearances  are  against  such 
a  doctrine.  If  God  and  man  both  be  purposive  beings; 
then  if  man  be  a  free  agent  his  purpose  may  clash  with  that 
of  God  and  the  danger  arise  that  God's  purpose,  in  part 
at  least,  be  defeated.  How  is  this  contingency  to  be 
avoided?  If  God's  purpose  be  liable  to  be  defeated  even 
in  part,  he  is  no  longer  sovereign.  Kather  than  admit  this 
possibility  the  religious  thinker  will  consent  to  sacrifice  his 
own  freedom.  But  we  are  sure  that  no  such  sacrifice  is 
required.  If  we  distinguish  between  the  inner  and  direct 
relation  of  the  divine  purpose  to  the  human  soul,  that 
relation  in  which  its  institution  and  maintenance  is  in- 
volved, and  the  more  indirect  relation  which  arises  between 
the  purposes  which  this  finite  agent  forms  and  the  all- 
including  divine  purpose,  the  real  point  of  the  issue  here 
will  begin  to  be  clear.  The  question  here  is  not  how  the 
finite  purpose  can  exist  as  a  real  purpose  within  the  scope 
of  the  divine,  for  this  is  provided  for  in  the  reality  of  the 
being  constituted  in  the  direct  relation.  The  question  here 
is  that  of  the  correlation  of  the  purposes  in  such  a  way 
that  the  free  activity  of  the  finite  may  be  respected  and  the 


ciiap.v.  FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  667 

untrammeled  realization  of  the  divine  purpose  at  the  same 
time  secured.  The  form  of  the  solution  has  already  been 
indicated  in  the  distinction  drawn  between  the  inner  pur- 
pose itself  and  the  sphere  of  outer  activities  through  which 
it  is  realized,  and  it  is  this  distinction  which  we  wish  to 
elaborate  with  some  further  detail  here.  When  we  con- 
sider our  purposes  in  relation  to  the  means  by  which  they 
are  realized  we  find  that  while  the  initiative  is  our  own, 
including  the  determination  of  will  that  something  shall  be 
which  is  not  yet, — that  while  this  is  our  own,  yet  the  whole 
objective  mechanism  which  is  set  in  motion  to  realize  that 
purpose  is  not  our  own  but  belongs  to  a  system,  the  parts 
of  which  our  wills  have  some  mysterious  power  of  influen- 
cing, but  over  which  as  a  whole  we  have  no  conscious  control. 
Let  us  suppose,  then,  that  there  are  a  plurality  of  wills  like 
our  own  which  have  this  faculty  of  forming  purposes  and  of 
influencing  in  some  way  parts  of  this  objective  machinery 
for  their  realization.  If  there  be  a  divine  will  whose  pur- 
pose is  the  organ  of  an  all-comprehending  thought  which 
knows  the  world,  including  your  purpose  and  mine,  through 
and  through ;  may  we  not  suppose  that  this  purpose  will  be 
directly  related  to  the  whole  of  the  mechanism  of  realiza- 
tion and  that  it  will  be  able  to  employ  it,  including  the  very 
activities  which  are  realizing  the  finite  purposes,  to  realize 
the  all-comprehending  divine  purpose,  so  that  just  as  a 
commanding  human  intelligence  and  will  may  shape  the 
destinies  of  a  state  by  co-ordinating  forces  and  activities, 
some  of  which  may  have  been  initiated  for  its  destruction, 
so  God  in  like  manner,  but  in  a  far  more  absolute  sense, 
may  move  triumphantly  on  toward  the  completion  of  his 
designs,  not  suppressing  or  interfering  with,  the  freedom  of 
the  finite  agencies,  but  making  even  the  wrath  of  wicked 
men  to  praise  him? 

This  illustration  will  serve,  we  think,  to  clear  our 
thoughts  on  the  question  of  the  possibility  of  free  human 
activity  in  a  world  where  the  divine  sovereignty  is  main- 
tained.    The  question  of  possibility  is  in  truth  the  only  one 


G6S  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

at  issue.  For  the  voice  of  experience  is  not  doubtful  in 
its  testimony  to  the  fact  of  untrammeled  free  activity 
on  the  part  of  man.  The  fact  is  clear  enough  and  all 
our  conduct  in  life  proceeds  on  the  presumption  of  its 
validity.  It  is  only  when  we  consider  the  more  erudite 
aspect  of  experience  and  seek  to  connect  our  activities  with 
their  ultimate  grounds,  that  we  begin  to  fear  our  fact 
may  be  a  mere  appearance.  The  doctrine  that  it  is  such 
has  had  wide  vogue  in  philosophy,  and  it  has  invariably  led 
to  a  total  or  partial  suppression  of  the  reality  of  the  finite 
agent,— pantheism  representing  the  logical  extreme  in  this 
direction.  We  are  convinced,  however,  that  this  pantheistic 
interpretation  is  not  necessary;  that,  on  the  contrary,  it  is 
the  result  partly  of  a  mistaken  method  and  partly  of  a 
confusion  of  thought.  The  method  of  experience  leads  up 
to  God  and  it  links  the  finite  soul  vitally  with  God,  but 
it  carries  its  own  corrective  with  it  in  the  inextinguishable 
sense  of  its  own  reality  and  of  the  essential  uniqueness  of 
its  own  being.  The  method  of  experience  forbids  that  at 
any  point  in  our  approach  to  the  divine  we  surrender 
our  own  individuality  and  become  simply  an  organ 
of  the  divine  life.  Again,  the  pantheistic  conclusion  is 
partly  due  to  a  confusion  of  thought,  for  if  we  distinguish 
the  direct  relation  of  the  divine  purpose  to  the  human  soul, 
the  activity  in  which  it  is  constituted,  from  the  indirect 
relation,  the  activity  in  which  the  divine  purpose  is  co- 
ordinated with  the  finite  human  purposes,  our  thoughts 
will  be  on  the  way  to  becoming  clear  on  two  fundamental 
points.  In  the  first  place,  the  direct  relation  of  God 
to  the  human  soul  is  not  pantheistic  but  constitutive,  rather, 
of  real  individual  existence;  while  in  the  second  place  the 
relation  of  the  divine  purpose  to  the  human  may  be  con- 
strued in  a  way  that  confirms  the  testimony  of  expe- 
rience to  the  freedom  of  our  own  finite  agency  and  at  the 
same  time  guarantees  the  fullest  sweep  of  the  divine 
sovereignty.1 

1 1  regret  the  necessity  of  dissenting  in  a  measure  from  two  of 


chap.  v.  FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  669 

The  destiny  of  man  is  a  theme  in  regard  to  which  our 
conclusions  will  be  influenced  largely  by  onr  views  as  to 
man's  power  and  freedom.  His  destiny  will  involve  all  his 
relations;  those  which  bind  him  to  nature  as  well  as  those 
which  bind  him  to  God.  If,  with  the  materialistic  de- 
terminist,  we  regard  man  as  the  mere  product  of  natnre, 
completely  subject  to  its  laws,  we  shall  then  be  disposed  to 
put  a  light  estimate  on  his  power  and  limit  his  destiny 
to  the  place  which  he  occupies  in  the  time-series  to  which  he 
belongs.  The  dropping  out  of  his  individual  organism 
from  the  place  it  has  held  in  the  series  and  the  dissolution 
of  its  corporeal  part  into  its  elements,  will  constitute  the 
final  chapter  of  his  destiny,  and  his  death  will  strictly  end 
all.  If,  again,  we  have  gone  over  to  the  camp  of  the 
pantheist  and  regard  man's  relation  to  the  divine  in  such 
a  way  that  his  organism  stands  as  a  mere  finite  mode  of 
the  divine  activity  in  the  world,  then  it  follows  that  the 
dissolution  of  this  organism  will  carry  with  it  all  that  is 
distinctive  in  the  individual  consciousness  and  that  man's 
conscious  part  will  lapse  into  the  ocean  of  the  divine  con- 
sciousness. In  this  case,  again,  death  will  end  all  for  the 
individual.  Let  us,  however,  refuse  to  go  to  these  extremes 
and  while  agreeing  that,  on  the  one  hand,  man  is  in  a  very 
important  sense  a  product  of  nature,  and  on  the  other,  just 

Professor  Royce's  doctrines.  In  the  first  place  I  feel  that  with  all  his 
fine  insight  he  does  not  quite  succeed  in  making  the  Kantian  doctrine 
of  freedom  tractable  to  experience.  Man's  freedom  still  dwells  too 
much  in  an  ultra-experiential  region.  The  only  way  to  preserve 
freedom  and  at  the  same  time  to  bring  it  into  vital  relations  with  the 
daily  business  of  our  lives,  is  in  my  opinion,  to  identify  it  with  the 
fundamental,  self-asserting  effort  of  individuality  itself,  so  that  when- 
ever man  asserts  himself  as  a  self-initiating  agent  in  the  world,  he  en- 
joys his  freedom.  The  second  point  is  that  of  the  relation  of  the  hu- 
man to  the  divine  agency.  I  fail  to  see  where  in  Royce's  theory  of 
the  grounding  of  the  individual  in  the  divine  purpose,  the  point  of 
my  own  self-assertiveness  as  a  real  being,  is  adequately  secured. 
The  theory  seems  to  leave  the  individual  open  to  the  peril  at  least 
of  being  so  completely  merged  in  the  divine  purpose  as  to  become 
practically  unreal. 


670 


DEDUCTIONS. 


PART  III. 


as  really  a  finite  replica  of  the  divine,  the  type  of  whose  life 
is  also  the  form  of  his  own,  let  ns  put  the  emphasis  on  the 
other  side  of  the  picture  which  presents  man  in  his  relation 
to  nature  as  the  bearer  of  a  purposive  activity  relating  him 
to  a  world  of  ideal  existence  that  is  to  be,  and  in  his  relation 
to  God  as  a  unique  individual  whose  being  cannot  be  trans- 
lated into  a  mere  organ  of  the  divine,  but  is  the  bearer 
of  a  purposive  activity  which  not  only  is  free  in  its  initiative 
but  has  free  scope  in  the  world.  If  we  thus  regard  man 
as  a  free  agent  capable  of  conceiving  ideal  purposes  and  of 
realizing  them  in  the  activities  of  his  life,  we  shall  be  dis- 
posed to  modify  our  conceptions  of  his  destiny  accordingly 
and  admit,  at  least,  that  there  is  a  problem  beyond  the 
solution  that  is  given  by  death. 

Let  us  consider  in  the  first  place  the  grounds  out  of 
which  the  problem  of  man's  destiny  arises.  There  is 
one  event  which  happens  alike  to  animals  and  men,  that 
is,  death,  and  in  appearance,  for  men  as  for  the  animals, 
death  seems  to  end  all.  We  have  no  reason  to  suppose 
that  the  animal  is  in  a  position  to  contemplate  this 
tragic  ending  of  life.  No  animal,  we  may  suppose,  has 
any  conception  of  death  or  makes  any  conscious  calcula- 
tions founded  on  its  approach.  It  has  no  hopes  or  aspi- 
rations, then,  which  are  liable  to  be  crossed  by  the 
shadow  of  death.  This  is  the  difference  between  the 
animal  and  the  man.  The  man  has  realized  death  as  a 
fact;  he  has  formed  a  conception  of  it  and  broods  upon  it 
as  it  approaches  or  threatens,  and  its  dark  shadows  fall 
across  the  pathway  of  his  hopes  and  aspirations.  This 
leads  him  to  attempt  to  read  the  meaning  of  his  life  in  the 
terms  of  its  brevity.  He  is  part  of  a  social  and  historical 
world-order  which  he  calls  humanity  and  he  sees  himself 
as  a  being  who  for  a  brief  span  participates  in  this  life  of 
humanity,  shares  in  its  aspirations  and  ideals,  enters  into 
its  struggles  and  pours  out  his  heart 's  treasures  for  its  good ; 
then  in  a  moment  he  has  fallen  into  oblivion  and  the  cur- 
rent sweeps  on  without  him  and  apparently  unconscious  of 


chap.v.  FKEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  G71 

its  loss;  for  other  individuals  come  forward  to  take  the 
place  of  the  lost,— and  what  are  a  myriad  or  two  of  in- 
dividuals more  or  less  any  way?  This  brevity  of  life  and 
the  apparently  small  estimate  which  the  social  order  puts 
upon  it,  is  a  fact  that  affects  man's  sense  of  all  the  values 
of  things.  If  the  life  of  the  individual  be  thus  brief  and 
relatively  of  so  little  worth,  then  the  things  which  men  strive 
for  are  to  be  judged  accordingly,  and  the  greater  part  of 
that  with  which  man  has  been  laboriously  enriching  him- 
self may  be  thrown  overboard  as  worthless.  With  a  sense 
of  relief  we  may  imagine  a  man  turning  to  what  is  left. 
At  least  the  problem  of  life  has  been  simplified,  he  will 
think,  and  in  this  he  will  not  be  wrong,  for  what  is  left  to 
care  for  is  simply  the  interest  of  the  span-life  of  the  pres- 
ent. This,  in  fact,  is  all  that  the  animal  has  to  care  for,  at 
Least  consciously,  and  why  may  not  man  thus  limit  himself 
and  be  happy?  "Let  us  eat,  drink  and  be  merry  for  to- 
morrow we  die,"  was  not  the  utterance  of  a  man  who  ranks 
as  one  of  the  world's  fools.  Its  author  was  a  man  like 
Omar  who  had  rightfully  gauged  the  world  of  the  present 
span,  when  once  it  has  been  torn  loose  from  its  connections 
with  a  larger  whole,  and  its  values  have  been  determined 
in  terms  of  its  own  measure  of  existence.  If  life  is  to  last 
only  a  day,  and  that  is  the  end  of  it,  there  is  no  scope  for 
any  kind  of  postponement.  To  sacrifice  the  present  would  be 
to  miss  living  altogether,  and  self-denial  would  become  iden- 
tical with  the  denial  of  life.  It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that 
either  the  ancient  or  the  more  modern  sage  meant  to  make 
any  plea  for  a  selfish  life.  Their  counsel  is,  to  make  the 
most  of  the  present  life  and  the  present  span  which  contains 
in  it  the  sphere  of  sociality  and  the  generous  as  well  as  the 
selfish  deed.  It  is  not  the  pig-sty  ideal  of  life  we  have 
here  presented.  Rather,  it  is  an  ideal  for  which  there  is 
much  to  be  said.  A  man  ought  to  make  the  most  of  the 
present  and  he  is  justified  in  including  as  much  of  the 
pleasure  of  life  as  possible  in  the  present  moment.  The 
refinement  of  this   ideal   is  very  attractive   and  presents 


672 


DEDUCTIONS. 


PART  III. 


us  with  the  picture  of  the  elegant  and  cultured  gentle- 
man, given  to  hospitality,  refined  in  all  his  tastes,  instinct 
with  sociality,  an  eminently  clubable  man,  who  passes 
through  life  without  rancor,  and  when  at  length  he  drops 
out  leaves  a  large  circle  to  lament  the  loss  of  a  genial 
presence.  This  is  perhaps  the  ideal  which  the  average  man 
would  regard  as  in  a  sense  unapproachable. 

Now,  Ave  may  ask,  what  is  the  trouble  with  such  a  life? 
A\'e  cannot  answer  the  question  by  simply  looking  on  the 
one  picture.  But  we  have  ringing  in  the  chambers  of  our 
memory  that  fine  old  saying  of  Augustine  with  which  he 
begins  his  Confessions,  ' l  Thou  hast  made  us  for  thyself  and 
our  souls  can  find  no  rest  until  they  rest  in  Thee."  Per- 
haps, however,  our  old  sages  themselves  will  betray  the 
reverse  of  their  ideal  in  the  very  terms  in  which  life  is 
described.  To  both  of  them  there  comes  an  overwhelming 
sense  of  the  vanity  and  worthlessness  of  life  with  an  in- 
curable weariness  and  ennui.  Its  pleasures  soon  pall  and 
its  attractiveness  becomes  stale.  Its  very  changes  weary 
with  the  monotony  of  their  tread-mill  self-repetition, 
and  the  sweets  of  recurrent  enjoyments  turn  into  bit- 
terness, until  the  call  to  revelry  becomes  a  reminder  of 
despair  and  of  the  mocking  death's  head  which  sits 
grinning  at  their  feast.  Now,  the  evil  spirit  which  mars  the 
picture  and  turns  the  riches  of  life  to  dross  is  not  anything 
that  is  present  in  the  picture  itself,— not  any  feature  that 
perhaps  ought  to  be  eliminated,  but  rather  something  that 
the  artist  has  left  out.  There  is  something  in  life  that  is 
not  in  the  representation  and  it  is  this  forgotten  element 
that  turns  up  as  the  root  of  bitterness  in  the  sweetest 
enjoyment  of  life.  What  is  this  vital  element?  Is  it  not 
the  ideal  of  a  continuous  and  progressive  life;  the  ideal 
of  life  as  a  struggle  to  realize  the  infinite ;  a  struggle  out  of 
which  comes  all  the  permanent  good  of  being?  What  else 
have  these  men  done  than  mistake  the  profounder  sig- 
nificance of  their  own  being,  a  mistake  which  leads  them 


chap.v,  FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  673 

inevitably  to  the  vain  effort  to  force  their  lives  into  the 
Procrustean  bed  of  a  purely  finite  mold? 

As  we  go  on  with  this  exposition  it  will  become  evident 
that  such  is  the  fatal  defect  in  the  life  ideals  which  these 
men  set  before  them.  We  find  the  germ  of  a  pessimistic 
view  in  Kant  whose  steady  look  at  life  revealed  to  him 
the  root  of  evil  that  was  in  it.  On  the  side  of  knowl- 
edge Kant  also  found  a  chasm  between  the  finite  which 
is  knowable  but  lacking  in  worth,  and  the  infinite  which  we 
value  at  the  highest  but  cannot  know.  What  more  natural 
than  that  the  old  philosopher  should  have  despaired  of  a 
life  thus  bound  in  the  aes-duplex  of  ignorance  and  evil? 
We  stand  breathless,  expecting  to  hear  him  join  the  two 
sages  in  counseling  a  species  of  self-oblivious  absorption 
in  the  sensuous  enjoyments  of  the  present  as  a  means  of 
temporary  forgetfulness  of  the  ghastly  failure  of  life,  just 
as  the  drunkard  seeks  oblivion  in  his  cups.  But  no,  Kant 
is  made  of  sterner  stuff  and  an  intuition  comes  to  him 
which  the  others  did  not  see.  Let  it  be  true  that  my  present 
moment  of  existence  is  bound  in  evil  and  ignorance,  and 
that,  viewed  under  the  mere  finite  time-span  of  the  present, 
it  presents  the  appearance  of  futility  from  every  other 
point  of  view  than  that  of  the  enjoyment  of  the  present 
moment.  Why  should  I  not  continue  to  contemplate  it 
under  this  mere  finite  time-span  ?  Because  I  find  in  myself 
the  capacity ;  nay  the  pressure,  of  moral  ideals  whose  scope 
is  infinite  and  which  forbid  my  attempting  to  limit  my  life 
aspirations  to  any  finite  horizon.  And  the  significant  fact 
about  these  ideals  is  that  they  involve  all  that  is  of  supreme 
value  for  life.  If  I  throw  them  away  I  part  with  all  that 
makes  life  worth  living.  If  I  turn  my  back  upon  them  I 
am  immediately  facing  the  darkness.  If  I  lose  faith  in 
them  because  they  are  infinite  and  not  to  be  compassed  in 
any  finite  span  of  existence,  there  is  no  other  faith,  that  can 
sustain  life  in  decent  dignity,  to  take  its  place.  Life  is 
a  moral  process,  a  progressive  realization  of  an  ideal  which 
commands  me  ' '  up  and  onward  forever  more. ' '  The  whole 
43 


674  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

worth  of  my  life  is  bound  up  in  this  ideal,  and  all  the 
permanent  riches  of  life  are  gained  in  the  effort  put  forth 
for  its  realization.  But  this  ideal  is  not  a  practical  goal 
that  can  be  begun,  continued  and  ended  in  any  merely 
finite  existence ;  it  is  only  practicable  to  a  being  whose  real 
life  is  not  circumscribed  by  any  time-span,  whose  struggle 
is  not  a  mere  phenomenon  of  a  temporal  order,  but  all  of 
whose  goings  are  those  of  one  who  has  had  a  vision  of  the 
eternal. 

The  doctrine  of  man  to  which  we  have  been  led  by  a 
study  of  his  experience,  presents  his  whole  life  as  a  teleo- 
logical  struggle  toward  the  attainment  of  that  which  is  not 
but  which  is  to  be.  A  cross-section  of  man's  experience  at 
any  assignable  point  will,  therefore,  reveal  the  fact  of 
unattained  ideals.  The  worth  of  life  consists  not  in  its  pres- 
ent possessions,  but  in  what  it  sets  out  to  be  or  to  become. 
This  is  the  deepest  fact  of  life,  the  one  that  the  pessimists 
overlook  to  their  undoing.  Taking  this  teleological  measure 
of  life,  let  us  see  how  it  wTorks  out  in  man 's  experience.  Man, 
we  say,  is  an  end-seeking  being  and  his  fundamental  aim 
is  to  achieve  some  good,  say,  happiness  or  culture.  But  in 
seeking  this  good  he  finds  that  he  cannot  pursue  it  as  an 
isolated  individual,  but  that  his  social  nature  binds  him  to 
his  kind  in  such  a  way  that  his  ideal  of  good  will  be 
wrecked  if  he  does  not  translate  it  into  terms  that  shall  in- 
clude the  good  of  others  as  well  as  his  own.  But  this 
enlargement  is  not  sufficient,  since  out  of  the  social  con- 
sciousness arises  the  ethical  with  its  ideals  which  refuse 
to  conform  to  any  finite  limits.  Man's  ethical  conscious- 
ness brings  him  into  relations  with  distinctions  of  right 
and  wrong,  good  and  evil,  and  it  brings  to  bear  on  him  the 
pressure  of  ideals  of  life  which  have  no  finite  measures.  But 
the  story  does  not  end  here.  The  religious  consciousness 
is  just  as  real  in  experience  as  the  ethical,  and  here  the 
teleological  movement  of  man's  life  reaches  its  climax  in 
an  experience  in  which  he  is  brought  face  to  face  with  the 
life  of  the  eternal,  and  to  the  realization  that  in  the  life 


chap.  v.  FEEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  675 

of  the  eternal,  his  own  life  is  rooted.  In  the  religious 
experienee  man  seems  to  attain  his  true  life  in  the  life  with 
God,  and  this  experience  fulfills  the  Augustinian  invocation 
by  leading  the  finite  up  to  the  point  where  il  finds,  fully 
realized,  those  infinite  ideals  after  which  it  has  been 
dimly  striving  from  the  beginning. 

Man's  life  thus  takes  the  form  of  a  teleological  process, 
a  struggle  toward  the  realization  of  ideals  which  may  not  be 
imprisoned  within  the  four  walls  of  any  present  expe- 
rience. The  progress  of  his  experience  tends  to  bring  the 
infinite  lineaments  of  these  ideals  into  clearer  and  clearer 
light.  The  progressive  stages  of  his  social,  moral  and 
religious  life  are  the  unfoldings  of  one  story,  the  end  and 
meaning  of  which  is  that  the  only  satisfying  measure  of 
the  life  of  a  being  like  man  is  a  divine  measure,  one  that 
will  take  in  the  broad  sweep  of  the  eternal  and  enable  him 
to  fellowship  with  God.  Now  all  the  proofs  of  immortality 
from  Plato  down  to  Fiske  have  rested  on  the  presumption 
of  the  teleological  character  of  man's  life.  To  Plato  man's 
nature  is  of  divine  origin,  but  he  is  immersed  in  sense. 
There  is,  however,  a  divine  capacity  in  him  and  his  true 
knowledge  as  well  as  his  true  good  consists  in  rising  to  the 
contemplation  of  the  eternal  archetypes  or  ideals  of  reality. 
A  being  whose  true  ideals  are  thus  infinite  and  eternal  can- 
not perish,  but  must  be  the  bearer  of  an  eternal  existence. 
The  Platonic  proofs  have  supplied  the  model  of  all  proof  in 
this  field.  Kant  seizes  on  the  principle  and  magnifies  its 
ethical  aspect ;  John  Fiske  puts  his  faith  in  the  same  prin- 
ciple on  its  naturalistic  side  and  argues  from  the  teleolog- 
ical character  of  the  evolution-process  of  which  man  is  the 
climax,  to  the  perdurability  of  man  himself.  God  would 
not  take  such  infinite  trouble,  he  thinks,  to  produce  such 
a  being  as  man,  just  to  let  him  drop  in  the  end  like  a 
broken  toy.  Moreover,  the  normal  progress  of  man's  expe- 
rience is  in  the  direction  of  more  permanent  ideals.  Shall 
we  put  reason  to  permanent  confusion  by  supposing  that 
these  ideals  are  mere  illusions  and  that  the  bearer  of  them 


676  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

lives  but  to  obtain  a  glimpse  of  them  and  then  drops 
forever  out  of  existence?  The  argument  of  Royce  strikes 
deeper  but  is  still  Platonic.  Man's  life  is  not  only  rooted 
in  the  divine  purpose  and  itself  teleological  and  pur- 
posive, but  he  is,  as  it  were,  a  naturalized  citizen  of  the 
eternal  world.  Like  the  inhabitants  of  Beulah-land,  he 
speaks  naturally  the  dialect  of  the  ' '  Celestial  City, ' '  and  it 
is  contradictory  to  the  whole  scope  and  horizon  of  his  normal 
existence  to  suppose  his  life  to  be  measurable  by  any  finite 
time-span.  Man's  life  is  essentially  eternal,  and  by  that 
Royce  means  more  than  mere  endlessness  in  time,  though 
that  is  included  in  the  conception.  The  eternal  life  is  the 
divine  life  which  is  realized  in  every  moment  in  its  complete- 
ness and  is  not,  therefore,  partitioned  up  by  the  time-series 
into  a  vanishing  past,  a  momentary  present  and  an  un- 
realized future,  but  includes  these  moments  in  an  all- 
embracing  and  ever-present  experience.  Man  is  the  natural 
inheritor  of  the  eternal,  and  is,  therefore,  immortal. 

Much  as  they  differ,  the  tenor  of  all  these  arguments  is 
practically  the  same ;  they  all  proceed  on  the  Platonic 
intuition  of  the  teleological  character  of  man's  life.  In- 
volved in  man's  inmost  constitution  are  certain  divine 
ideals  which  at  first  are  mere  germs  hidden  by  the  thick 
coatings  of  his  sensuous  nature.  They  are  vital  germs, 
however,  and  soon  begin  to  emerge,  planting  themselves 
before  and  in  man's  consciousness,  making  it  forever  im- 
possible for  him  to  satisfy  himself  with  the  life  of  the  mere 
present  time  or  sense,  and  translating  his  whole  existence 
into  an  effort  to  realize  an  ideal  life  which  is  not  at  any 
given  moment  but  ever  is  to  be. 

"What,  then,  is  the  significance  of  these  proofs?  Is  the 
view  of  life  on  which  they  rest  to  be  taken  as  expressing  its 
real  meaning?  Or  do  they  proceed  on  fundamentally  mis- 
taken premises  and  do  they  embody  a  species  of  ungrounded 
romance  of  the  aspirations?  Let  us  consider  again 
the  dilemma  which  arises  in  our  experience.  We  have  seen 
that  from  one  point  of  view,  and  that  the  most  obvious  and 


chap.  v.  FREEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  677 

obtrusive,  there  is  nothing  so  perishable  as  the  individual 
existence.  Man  belongs  to  a  social  order  which  is  vastly 
more  permanent  than  himself,  and  to  a  world-order  in  com- 
parison with  which  his  life-span  is  a  mere  moment.  He 
is  the  most  perishable  of  all  the  things  with  which  he 
deals.  The  trees  he  plants,  the  houses  he  builds,  the 
institutions  he  founds,  the  business  firms  in  which  he  is 
partner,  the  books  he  reads  and  perchance  writes,— 
these  all  survive  him,  while  he,  the  creator  and  the  en- 
joyer,  the  being  for  whom  these  things  exist,  drops  out 
of  the  story  and  crumbles  to  dust.  It  is  not  possible  to 
exaggerate  from  this  point  of  view  the  brevity,  the 
futility,  the  worthlessness  of  life.  The  most  despairing 
plaints  of  the  world's  literature  stand  justified  and  the 
scorn  and  contumely  which  the  pessimist  pours  upon  life 
seems  like  the  noble  raging  of  a  soul,  born  for  better  things, 
against  a  fate  which  defeats  all  its  worthy  aspirations. 
Truly  in  such  an  existence  the  only  point  of  reality  is  the 
present  moment.  All  ideality  is  futile,  since  there  is  no 
time  for  ideals.  He  who  saves  his  life  loses  it,  and  loses 
not  to  find,  for  on  such  a  view  there  is  no  bank  in  which  life 
can  secure  its  funds.  The  true  wisdom,  then,  is  to  spend 
the  treasure  out  of  hand  and  leave  the  future,  if  there  be 
such,  to  save  itself  from  bankruptcy.  So  the  wise  man 
counsels  prodigality  of  present  resources,  absorption  in  the 
sensuous  present,  oblivion  of  the  future  and  the  ideal 
aspirations  it  contains.  But  life  has  something  in  it  that 
laughs  such  wisdom  to  scorn.  The  root  of  bitterness  mixes 
inevitably  with  the  wine  of  the  present  and  in  the  end  a 
life  of  the  mere  present,  a  life  without  ideals,  proves  to  be 
a  life  that  is  not  worth  living.  It  is  a  life  in  which  death 
sits  enthroned  at  all  the  feasts  and  propounds  to  fool  and 
sage  alike,  its  sphinx-like  riddle,  ' '  If  death  end  all  and  you 
mortals  be  nothing  but  ephemera  of  a  day,  what  signifies 
your  life  one  way  or  another,  and  why  not  fling  it  out  of 
hand  into  the  maw  of  death,  the  insatiable  devourer  of  you 
and  your  children?"     Truly  death  has  all  the  logic  on  its 


678 


DEDUCTIONS. 


PART  III. 


side.  We  suppose  the  animals  to  be  contented  with  their 
finite  span  of  existence  because  they  have  no  vision  of  the 
destroyer  and  no  meditations  on  death.  But  man  is  a  crea- 
ture who  meets  the  destroyer  face  to  face,  and  every  moment 
of  his  existence  is  troubled  with  premonitions  of  the  dark 
spectre  that  will  inevitably  cross  his  path,  and  of  the 
annihilation  that  lies  beyond.  All  life  thus  becomes  "a 
meditation  on  death." 

But  let  us  change  the  picture  and  look  upon  life  from  a 
different  point  of  view.  Man's  life  has  now  taken  on  the 
aspect  of  a  teleological  process  at  the  center  of  which  moves 
his  own  individual  self,  seeking  to  realize  itself  and  the 
world.  We  have  seen  in  the  middle  section  of  this  book 
how  the  arduous  process  goes  on  from  step  to  step  and  how 
the  individual  dominates  all  the  stages,  constituting  their 
form  and  at  the  same  time  their  final  end.  We  see  how  this 
individual  comes  to  dominate  his  world  and  how  the  uni- 
fication of  the  world  itself  finds  its  last  hiding  place  in  the 
consciousness  of  the  individual.  There  can  be  no  ground 
for  denying  the  value  of  the  individual  in  view  of  this 
fundamental  relation  to  the  world.  But  let  us  add  another 
chapter  to  our  story,  the  history  of  the  processes  in  which 
man's  social,  moral  and  religious  consciousness  is  awakened 
and  through  the  awakening  of  which  new  worlds  are  entered 
and  new  ideals  are  stimulated  into  activity.  We  find  here 
the  teleological  process  relating  itself  more  and  more 
intimately  to  ideals  which  are  transcendent  and  to  a  life 
which  is  lived  with  God.  This  individual  thus  dominating 
in  the  world  and  asserting  his  fellowship  with  the  divine, 
How  can  he  contemplate  the  linkage  of  his  ideals  to  the  mere 
span  of  a  temporal  existence  ?  The  vision  of  his  own  perish- 
ability seems  a  death-knell  to  all  that  is  of  supreme  worth, 
and  in  the  interest  of  the  only  life-ideals  which  seem  worth 
living  for,  he  postulates  an  existence  that  in  its  measure 
will  be  commensurate  with  his  standards  of  worth.  Shall 
we  call  this  an  illusion  and  the  postulate  simply  a  thin  veil 
behind  which  the  trembling  soul  essays  to  evade  its  fate? 


chap.v.  FKEEDOM  AND  DESTINY.  679 

Let  us  compare  the  two  pictures  of  life  representing  its 
dark,  perishable  side  and  its  aspect  of  greater  permanence 
and  hopefulness,  and  let  us  ask  which  one  of  these  is  the 
true  representation,  yielding  the  deeper  significance  to  life  ? 
There  is  a  sense,  no  doubt,  in  which  the  darker  picture  is 
obviously  true.  No  doubt,  man  is  perishable  and  the  in- 
dividual a  creature  of  a  day.  The  pessimistic  version  of 
life  has  plenty  of  facts  to  rest  on.  But  on  the  other  hand, 
the  teleological  version  is  also  correct.  Man  is  a  creature 
of  ideals  and  these  lead  him  on  to  a  closer  and  closer  walk 
with  God  and  to  a  more  and  more  complete  participation  In 
the  divine  life.  And  from  this  point  of  view  man  cannot 
but  contemplate  himself  as  the  bearer  of  an  eternal  exist- 
ence, inasmuch  as  all  his  real  interests  in  life  are  per- 
manent. Just  in  proportion,  then,  as  he  enters  into  this 
life  he  in  a  sense  realizes  his  immortality.  Shall  we  then 
resolve  our  dilemma  by  espousing  one  picture  and  rejecting 
the  other  as  untrue?  Verily,  in  that  case  we  should  be 
closing  our  eyes  to  the  whole  world  of  facts.  He  who  looks 
only  on  the  brevity  of  life  becomes  blind  to  its  more  endur- 
ing elements,  while  he  who  looks  only  on  the  ideal  side  and 
ignores  the  perishability  of  life,  misses  that  which  is  neces- 
sary to  keep  him  in  his  sober  senses.  The  true  solution  of 
the  problem  of  destiny  will  be  found,  we  think,  in  travel- 
ling the  same  road  that  led  to  the  solution  of  the  problem 
of  freedom.  Both  pictures  of  life  are  true  from  the  point 
of  view  from  which  they  have  been  painted  and  it  rests 
with  us  to  frame  them  into  a  representation  of  life  which 
will  be  catholic  enough  to  assign  to  each  its  true  place. 
In  dealing  with  the  problem  of  freedom,  we  find  that  man  '3 
free  agency  rises  out  of  his  natural  life  by  virtue  of  the  fact 
that  he  has  the  ability  to  conceive  and  realize  ideal  pur- 
poses ;  in  other  words,  that,  as  a  real  teleological  being,  he  is 
free.  His  freedom  is  consistent,  therefore,  with  his  natural 
determination.  In  like  manner,  while  man,  viewed  merely 
as  a  present  phenomenon  in  a  temporal  series,  can  assert 
no  claim  to  permanence  of  being  and  is  in  the  highest 


680  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

degree  unstable  and  perishable,  yet  when  we  take  into  con- 
sideration the  teleological  character  of  his  activity,  and 
especially  that  as  the  bearer  of  ideal  purposes,  his  life 
allies  itself  more  and  more  with  the  divine,  he  becomes  the 
natural  heir  of  an  existence  that  is  not  circumscribed  by 
any  time-span,  however  long.  Viewed,  then,  as  a  phe- 
nomenon of  nature,  man's  life  is  temporal  and  perishable, 
but  viewed  as  the  bearer  of  ideals  which  lead  him  on  to  the 
divine,  man  becomes  a  son  of  God  and  a  participant  in  the 
divine  order  of  existence.  We  see,  then,  that  man's  im- 
mortality rises  out  of  the  grounds  of  his  mortality  and 
that  just  as  he  learns  from  the  facts  of  his  experience  to 
expect  death  as  the  end  of  his  temporal  existence,  so  from 
the  facts  of  his  ideal  nature  and  the  standards  of  value 
which  it  imposes  on  him,  from  the  imperishable  outlook  of 
his  spiritual  horizon  and  from  the  divine  ideals  in  which 
his  life  participates,  he  is  led  to  postulate  an  immortal 
existence  commensurate  with  the  fundamental  interests 
and  ideals  of  his  life.  And  the  fact  that  he  realizes  his 
mortality  only  makes  the  more  valuable  to  him  his  own 
divine  sonship  and  his  part  in  the  life  of  God. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT. 

We  moderns  are  accustomed  to  apply  the  term  environ- 
ment to  the  whole  situation  in  which  a  man  finds  himself 
in  carrying  on  the  business  of  his  life.  There  is  nothing 
he  touches  or  that  touches  him  in  any  way  which  does 
not  in  some  way  affect  his  life.  Hence,  his  whole  sur- 
roundings are  conceived  to  be  a  system  of  forces  which  are 
playing  upon  him  incessantly  and  shaping  the  issues  of  his 
experience  and  destiny.  The  notion  of  environment  is 
dynamic,  therefore,  rather  than  static,  and  it  is  a  term  well 
adapted  to  the  surroundings  of  a  being  like  man  who 
realizes  his  whole  good  in  the  effort  to  overcome  and  enjoy 
the  world.  It  is  possible,  as  we  have  seen,  to  draw  a  dis- 
tinction within  this  broad  conception  of  environment,  be- 
tween the  actual  forces  of  the  present  and  those  which  have 
been  stored  up  in  literature,  institutions,  customs  and  prod- 
ucts of  art;  applying  the  term  environment  in  a  restricted 
sense  to  the  former,  while  to  the  latter,  guided  by  a  biolog- 
ical analogy,  we  apply  the  term  heredity,  because  these 
elements  do  represent  a  kind  of  social  inheritance.  Here, 
however,  the  conception  of  the  environment  is  used  in  an  all- 
inclusive  sense  and  man 's  environment  is  conceived  to  be  co- 
extensive with  everything  that  is  capable  of  influencing  him 
in  an  objective  way  through  his  bodily  or  mental  organism. 
Taken  in  this  sense,  then,  we  may  include  all  the  forces  of 
the  environment  under  the  two  categories  of  ordinary  and 

681 


682  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

transcendent.  The  ordinary  forces  will  include  the  spheres 
of  nature  and  humanity,  everything  that  influences  a  man 
in  his  ordinary  intercourse  with  the  world  and  his  fellow 
man. 

In  the  first  place,  then,  man  is  influenced  by  his  nat- 
ural environment,  which  includes,  of  course,  not  only  his 
relation  to  the  inorganic  forces  but  also  to  the  forces  of  the 
biological  world  of  which  he  forms  an  important  part. 
The  closeness  of  man's  dependence  on  nature  we  have  al- 
ready seen.  Not  only  is  man  influenced  directly  and 
powerfully  by  his  physical  environment;  he  is  in  a  sense 
formed  by  it,  and,  like  the  chameleon,  takes  on  the  very 
complexion  of  his  habitat.  History,  anthropology,  eco- 
nomics, all  unite  in  emphasizing  the  influence  upon  man  of 
his  physical  surroundings.  In  fact,  the  temptation  is  to 
exaggerate  the  effects  of  climate  and  other  geological  agents 
on  constitution  and  character.  But  man  is  even  more 
closely  bound  up  with  the  living  system  of  which  he  is  a 
part.  Here  the  chains  of  his  servitude  bind  him  not  only 
to  his  fellow  men,  but  also  to  the  animal  world.  One  of 
these  chains  is  heredity  through  which  he  lives  the  life  of 
the  race  and  even  of  the  animal  world,  and  epitomizes  in 
the  stages  of  his  experience  the  steps  of  an  evolution  which 
has  come  down  through  countless  ages.  Man  is  bound  to 
living  nature  through  his  heredity,  as  its  product  and 
epitome  as  well  as  its  crown.  Another  of  these  chains  is 
environment,  properly  so  called,  to  which  he,  like  other 
organisms,  responds,  the  forces  of  which  are  incessantly 
modifying  him  and  beating  him  into  shape.  When  we 
consider,  then,  what  a  grip  nature  is  able  to  take,  through 
these  two  agencies,  heredity  and  environment,  on  the  very 
soul  of  man,  it  will  be  conceded  that  to  exaggerate  the 
function  of  nature  in  the  making  of  man  would  be  difficult. 
In  fact,  it  has  been  shown  that  it  is  only  through  man's 
capacity  for  ideal  purposive  action  that  he  is  able  to  re- 
deem himself  from  complete  enslavement  to  his  natural 
environment. 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIEONMENT.  683 

Again,  man  is  influenced  by  his  human  environment, 
and  this  in  two  ways.  In  the  first  place,  he  is  largely  the 
product  of  its  culture-forces  stored  up  in  its  literatures, 
institutions,  customs  and  inherited  beliefs.  Some  of  these 
are  organized  into  definite  instruments  of  culture  which 
we  call  education,  but  they  are  all  educative  forces  of  very 
high  value.  Secondly,  we  have  the  operation  of  man's 
present  human  environment.  This  begins  with  his  infancy, 
or  even  his  pre-natal  period,  and  extends  on  to  the  end  of 
his  days  and  includes  the  operation  of  a  great  complex  of 
forces,  to  wit,  the  influence  of  parents  and  nurse  even  before 
the  age  of  imitation.  After  the  child  has  become  able  to 
observe  and  respond  to  what  is  going  on  about  it,  it  goes 
out  through  the  open  door  of  imitation  to  possess  itself  of  a 
world  of  untold  riches— the  plays  and  toys  of  its  childhood, 
the  traditions  of  the  nursery  and  kindergarten,  the  songs 
and  child-lore  that  it  learns,  its  child-companionships, 
quarrels  and  reconciliations,  the  gradual  unfolding  of  its 
social  nature  as  it  develops  toward  maturity,  the  influence 
of  its  social  environment,  the  little  circle  or  clique  to  w^hich 
it  belongs  and  which  for  the  time  being  constitutes  its 
world.  The  influence  of  the  human  environment  continues 
to  increase  as  it  expands  and  the  youth  blossoms  into 
manhood  and  passes  through  the  tutelage  of  schools,  socie- 
ties, out  into  the  broader  arena  of  church  and  state  and  the 
responsibilities  of  citizenship. 

How  are  wre  to  overestimate  the  influence  upon  man  of 
his  human  environment,  especially  when  we  add  to  the 
operation  of  the  present  forces,  the  potency  of  what  has 
come  down  to  him  through  heredity.  We  have  seen  that 
it  is  only  the  assertion  of  man's  higher  selfhood  that  saves 
him  from  servitude  to  nature,  and  here  he  is  face  to  face 
with  a  threatened  servitude  no  less  exacting.  Historical 
philosophers  like  Buckle  not  only  sell  men  into  captivity  to 
nature,  but  they  also  enslave  him  to  humanity  and  he 
becomes  the  victim  of  a  double  servitude.  They  over- 
look,  however,   the   germ   of    individuality   which   asserts 


684  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

itself  against  the  enslavement  of  nature  and  which  pro- 
vides a  saving  clause  in  man's  relation  with  humanity 
also.  The  very  social  and  cultural  forces  which  mold 
man  are  bound  to  nurture  in  him  that  individuality  which 
asserts  itself  in  ideals  of  life  and  action  and  in  purposes 
toward  their  realization.  Through  his  natural  and  human 
relations,  man  is  brought  into  vital  connection  with  the 
agencies  which  are  to  shape  him  and  without  which  he  would 
not  become  a  man.  His  servitude  is,  therefore,  necessary 
and  salutary.  But  the  striking  fact  of  the  situation  is  that 
these  formative  agencies  are  also  producing  the  conditions 
of  their  own  transcendence;  for  the  being  who  is  forming 
has  in  his  nature  the  germ  of  true  individuality  and  this 
tends  to  assert  itself  more  and  more  the  higher  he  rises 
in  the  developing  scale.  It  turns  out,  then,  that  after 
all  the  infinite  pains  which  the  social  organism  has  taken 
to  develop  the  individual,  the  individual  in  the  end  sub- 
ordinates the  social  to  the  claims  of  his  own  higher  being, 
and  nature  and  humanity  have,  in  truth,  been  simply 
schoolmasters  to  bring  man  to  his  own  chartered  freedom. 
The  whole  environment  of  man  is  not  made  up,  how- 
ever, of  the  ordinary  forces,  natural  and  social,  by  which  he 
is  surrounded.  We  have  learned  that  there  is  a  principle 
of  transcendence  in  man 's  experience  which  leads  him  every- 
where to  connect  the  sphere  of  finite  activities  with  the 
infinite.  It  is  an  internal  requirement  of  experience  itself 
that  the  finite  and  relative  shall  be  grounded  in  the 
infinite  and  eternal.  Man's  consciousness  thus  brings  him 
everywhere  to  the  threshold  of  the  infinite  and  makes  him 
responsive  to  influences  that  are  transcendent.  The 
function  of  the  transcendent  becomes  more  explicit  in  his 
ethical  experience  where  he  is  brought  into  direct  relations 
with  moral  ideals  and  it  blossoms  into  full  maturity  in  the 
field  of  his  religious  experience.  Entering  into  his  experi- 
ence in  an  intimate  manner,  the  transcendent  supplies  some 
of  the  most  vital  interests  and  the  most  potent  motives  of 
life.     It  is  the  spring  of  the  highest  ideals  and  of  those  as- 


chap.  VI.  MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT.  685 

pirations  which  lead  man  to  extend  the  horizon  of  his  hopes 
beyond  the  limits  of  the  present  temporal  existence.  In 
truth,  it  is  through  the  experience  of  the  transcendent  in 
the  ethical  and  religious  ideals  of  living  that  man  discovers 
his  highest  standards  of  value.  The  religious  conscious- 
ness which  brings  man  into  direct  relation  with  the  sphere 
of  the  transcendent  and  the  great  realities  which  it  con- 
tains, God  and  the  eternal  world,  is  more  potent  than  any 
other  agency,  in  vitalizing  man's  relation  to  the  transcend- 
ent, in  making  the  sphere  of  the  infinite  real  to  him  and  in 
making  him  an  enfranchised  citizen  of  a  world  that  reaches 
beyond  the  limits  of  the  world  of  ordinary  experience. 
The  power  which  this  part  of  man's  environment  exercises 
over  him  could  hardly  be  overestimated.  It  brings  him 
into  vital  relations  with  transcendent  ideals  and  opens  up 
an  undying  spring  of  aspiration  and  hope  in  the  very  heart 
of  his  consciousness.  So  potent  is  the  influence  of  religion 
that  in  its  evil  form  of  superstition  and  servile  fear,  it 
threatens  man's  complete  enslavement,  while  in  its  higher 
spiritual  and  more  enlightened  forms  it  is  a  most  potent 
agent  in  his  true  enfranchisement.  It  is  this  relation  to 
the  transcendent  that  is  the  fruitful  and  perennial  source 
of  those  deeper  convictions  of  our  nature  which,  resting  on 
no  definite  evidence,  yet  hold  us  true  to  the  infinite 
poles  and,  as  "Wordsworth  says,  constitute  "the  fountain- 
lights  of  all  our  seeing."  Now,  it  is  only  necessary  to 
supplement  our  story  of  man's  surroundings  with  that  of 
these  subtle  and  pervasive  forces  of  the  transcendent  in 
order  to  reach  a  full  appreciation  of  what  the  environment 
of  a  man  is  in  this  world  and  of  the  conditions  in  the  midst 
of  which  he  must  carry  on  his  life  struggle. 

In  this  system  it  is  a  man's  business  to  determine  his 
true  place  and  to  work  out  his  destiny  in  the  light  of  the 
highest  wisdom  to  which  he  can  attain.  He  will  find,  how- 
ever, that  the  initial  problem  which  confronts  him  is  not  one 
that  is  easy  of  solution.  Man's  true  place  in  the  system  of 
things  is  never  determined  by  accident.     He  finds  that  to 


(3g6  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

trust  to  accident  is  to  reduce  himself  to  slavery,— to  make 
himself  the  victim  of  that  world  in  which  he  ought  to  be 
master.  Let  us  suppose,  for  example,  that  a  man  allows 
himself  to  drift,  trusting  to  some  blind  god  of  a  future  to 
fix  his  place  in  the  system  of  things.  Like  any  other  waif, 
having  abdicated  his  prerogative  of  manhood,  he  becomes 
the  plaything  of  the  forces  which  are  bearing  him  on.  It  is 
only  a  short  road  to  the  sense  of  helplessness  that  overtakes 
the  sport  of  circumstances,  and  the  despairing  sense  of  his 
own  enslavement  soon  follows.  The  waif  on  the  ocean  of 
life  has  failed  to  assert  his  true  relation  to  the  system,  and 
hence  all  the  evils  that  follow,— the  feeling  of  enslavement, 
despair  of  accomplishing  any  good,  and  in  the  end  an 
endeavor  to  find  surcease  of  the  sense  of  life's  bankruptcy, 
either  by  resort  to  the  pessimist's  gospel  of  cessation  of 
existence  or  in  some  mad  plunge  into  the  vortex  of  the 
sensualist.  We  fix  our  normal  place  in  the  system  by 
asserting  the  right  of  our  individuality,  that  is,  by  assert- 
ing our  right  to  be  and  to  become  a  central  and  organizing 
force  in  the  system  to  which  we  belong.  What  is  the  sig- 
nificance of  this  complex  environment  in  which  I  am 
placed,  and  what  attitude  shall  I  as  an  individual  take  to 
it  in  order  to  work  out  my  true  destiny?  These  are  ques- 
tions which  I  am  bound  to  ask  and  my  answer  to  which  will 
be  determined  largely  by  the  conception  I  have  already 
formed  of  my  own  nature.  If  I  have  taken  the  attitude  of 
the  materialistic  determinist  and  regard  myself  as  simply 
a  product  of  my  environment,  and  my  being  and  my  life- 
struggle  as  simply  aspects  of  a  wider  and  all-determining 
course  of  nature,  I  shall  be  likely  to  answer  in  one  way. 
The  complex  environment  by  which  I  am  surrounded  will 
be  a  system  of  fatalistically  determining  forces  which  leave 
no  place  for  agency  on  my  part  and  limit  my  existence 
strictly  to  the  present  temporal  and  physical  order.  What 
we  have  called  the  ordinary  forces  of  the  environment  con- 
stitute the  whole,  and  if  we  eliminate  strictly  from  this 
complex    any    spiritual    delusions,    any    groundless    hopes 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIKONMENT.  687 

or  superstitions  regarding  the  life  beyond  this,  or  any  values 
other  than  those  bearing  the  stamp  of  the  present  life, 
we  shall  have  the  whole  story.  The  problem  of  life  to 
me  will  then  become  one  of  adjusting  myself  and  my 
interests  and  ideals  to  the  life  of  the  present  as  it  is  de- 
termined within  corporeal  limits.  The  whole  spiritual  out- 
look of  my  life  will  shrink  into  the  narrowest  limits  and  my 
whole  dream  of  the  transcendent,  with  its  content  of  ethical 
and  religious  ideals,  will  become  an  illusion  to  be  banished 
by  the  clear  light  of  day.  My  estimate  of  present  values  will 
be  determined  by  the  same  standard  of  temporal  and  cor- 
poreal measurement,  and  I  will  find  much  of  the  sacredness 
of  life  disappearing  and  much  of  the  value  which  I  had  been 
accustomed  to  attach  to  my  own  personality  and  that  of  my 
fellow  men,  gravitating  toward  zero,  in  spite  of  my  efforts 
to  keep  it  up  to  a  high  level.  And  though  through  a  sort 
of  after-glow  of  what  I  ma}'  choose  to  call  superstition 
I  am  able  to  preserve  some  remnants  of  faith  in  my  kind, 
I  feel  that  I  am  playing  a  losing  game.  For  why  should  a 
life  which  is  robbed  of  its  freedom  and  has  become  a  mere 
by-play  of  struggling  forces ;  a  life  which  has  no  perspective 
but  is  strictly  confined  to  the  time-span  of  the  present ; 
why  should  such  a  life  try  to  ape  any  sort  of  dignity  or 
be  anything  but  the  thing  of  shreds  and  patches  that  it  is? 
To  be  sure,  a  man  may  set  his  teeth  and  try  to  stem  the  tide 
by  wresting  some  semblance  of  nobility  from  even  such  a 
situation,  but  then  he  is  unconsciously  deserting  his  own 
standard  and  committing  himself  to  a  nobler  ideal. 

The  nobler  ideal  is  simply  the  conception  of  life  which 
the  man  adopts  who  realizes  that  his  true  place  in  the 
system  is  that  of  a  free  agent.  He  will  not  doubt  the  power 
of  his  environment  or  the  fact  that  he  is  in  a  very  im- 
portant sense  its  product  and  is  dependent  upon  it ;  but 
he  will  realize  the  fact  that  by  virtue  of  his  individuality  he 
is  a  being  capable  of  ideal,  purposive  action  and  may  there- 
fore rise  above  his  environment  in  various  ways  and  may 
even  turn  upon  it  and  reform  it.     And  in  realizing  his  free- 


688  DEDUCTIONS.  part  iii, 

dom  he  will  also  come  to  his  own  in  a  true  conception  of  the 
relation  of  his  life-struggle  to  the  environment.  This  sur- 
rounding system  of  things  is  simply  the  world  in  the  midst 
of  which  his  conscious  agency  finds  itself.  It  is  the  world 
he  is  to  go  out  upon  and  overcome.  Here,  then,  is  the 
stage  for  the  setting  of  the  whole  drama  of  realization.  A 
man  seizes  his  environment  as  his  opportunity  and  his 
point  of  departure,  notwithstanding  the  handicaps  in  his 
present,  and  from  this  point  of  departure  goes  out  in 
that  splendid  effort  through  which  he  and  his  race  are 
destined  to  overcome  the  world.  And  it  is  a  splendid 
effort,  replete  with  the  riches  of  achievements,  notwith- 
standing the  heart-rending  failures  of  it.  For  it  is  in  his 
effort  to  play  the  free  man  that  man  becomes  free,  and  the 
achievement  of  his  charter  as  a  free  man  is  simply  the 
whole  struggle  by  which  he  overcomes  the  world  and  gives 
it  its  place  in  a  system  of  realized  experience.  A  man's 
environment  is  his  opportunity  to  play  the  man,  and  in  the 
system  of  efforts  which  he  puts  forth  to  prove  his  mastery 
he  develops  all  those  splendid  powers  the  record  of  which  so 
glorifies  the  page  of  history.  As  he  moves  on  in  his  struggle 
he  finds  the  need  of  larger  faith  as  well  as  larger  knowl- 
edge. The  old  aims  give  place  to  more  generous  ideals; 
the  old  ambitions  to  those  that  are  more  commensurate  with 
his  enlarging  vision.  For  as  he  penetrates  his  world  he 
finds  it  not  only  becoming  larger  but  also  richer.  His 
individual  ideals  swell  out  into  social  ideals,  his  social 
ideals  into  ethical,  and  his  ethical  ideals  into  those  of 
religion.  The  world  of  the  ordinary  natural  and  social  is 
no  longer  adequate  to  his  growing  experience,  for  his 
horizon  is  everywhere  shading  off  into  the  transcendent; 
his  ideal  of  life  is  passing  from  the  temporal  into  the 
eternal  and  no  conception  of  experience  is  competent  to  fill 
out  the  measure  of  his  requirements  except  one  in  which 
his  finite  spirit  fellowships  with  God.  Thus  to  a  man  who 
takes  the  attitude  of  a  free  man  toward  life,  it  becomes  an 
arena  for  the  realization  of  the  highest  ideals. 


CHAP. VI.  MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT.  539 

It  is  in  the  effort  to  work  out  his  destiny  in  the  world 
that  a  man  comes  into  normal  relations  with  the  good  and 
evil  of  the  world.  Let  a  man  give  up  the  struggle  and 
become  an  idle  spectator  of  the  drama  of  other  men 's  lives ; 
or,  without  consciously  giving  up  his  own  effort,  let  him 
take  simply  the  spectator's  chair  in  the  life-assembly,  and 
it  will  be  impossible  for  him  to  reach  anything  like  a  true 
conception  of  life  in  its  most  vital  relation  to  the  good  and 
evil  of  the  world.  It  will  no  doubt  be  true  to  the  end  of 
time  that  the  observers  of  the  life-drama  will  be  divided 
in  opinion  as  to  whether  there  be  more  of  evil  or  more  of 
good  in  the  world.  But  this  is  not,  after  all,  a  very  grave 
matter  since  the  vital  point  at  which  you  or  I  touch  evil  is  in 
its  connection  with  the  struggle  of  our  own  life.  Let 
a  man  take  the  attitude  of  the  worker  and  not  that 
of  the  idler,  and  things  will  fall  into  their  true  rela- 
tions. Whether  or  not  there  be  more  of  evil  than  of  good 
in  the  world,  the  fact  which  confronts  every  man  in  his 
true  attitude  toward  the  world  is  that  evil  is  a  real  factor 
in  his  life.  It  stands  as  the  adversary  to  be  vanquished, 
the  negative  to  be  suppressed,  the  obstacle  to  be  overcome. 
And  the  good  is  just  beyond ;  it  is  the  goal  of  the  struggle 
and  comes  as  the  crown  of  completed  effort.  This  is  not 
a  show-world  of  ours,  but  a  world  of  serious  business  in 
which  evil  confronts  us  without  and  within.  It  is  our  work 
to  fight  it  in  the  world  and  it  is  above  all  our  business  to 
fight  it  within  ourselves.  The  worst  enemies  are  our  own 
sins  and  temptations  which  assail  us  like  traitors  in  the 
very  citadel  of  our  greatest  strength.  In  overcoming  the 
adversaries  which  block  our  pathway  to  the  realization  of 
the  good  our  stubbornest  foe  is  likely  to  be  our  own  evil 
self,  the  self  that  stands  as  the  maleficent  embodiment  of 
our  sins  and  as  the  ideal  of  what  we  are  tempted  to  become. 
Now  it  is  out  of  man's  connection  with  the  evil  which  is  in 
and  about  him  that  there  arises  one  of  his  most  vital  rela- 
tions to  his  environment.  The  problem  of  evil  in  its 
theoretic  form  is  enormously  complex,  as  we  have  seen,  and 
44 


690  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

it  is  not  at  all  simple  in  its  practical  relation  to  man's 
struggle  to  realize  his  end  in  life.  But  we  have  at  least  de- 
termined the  true  point  of  view  from  which  a  man  is  to 
contemplate  the  evil.  Not  as  an  idle  spectator,  but  as  a 
worker,  does  he  come  into  normal  relations  with  any  of  the 
forces  in  his  environment.  If,  then,  evil  arises  normally  as 
a  factor  to  be  dealt  with  in  working  out  our  destiny,  we 
may  ask,  what  is  this  evil,  practically  considered;  where 
are  we  to  look  for  the  hidings  of  its  power;  and  finally, 
how  is  it  to  be  overcome? 

How  are  we  to  define  practically  the  notion  of  evil? 
Clearly  it  cannot  be  conceived  in  purely  objective  terms, 
without  reference  to  the  life-struggle  of  man.  We  have  seen 
that  it  is  only  in  this  struggle  that  it  acquires  a  normal 
meaning  for  man.  We  have  seen  also  that  life  is  teleolog- 
ical  and  derives  its  whole  meaning  from  some  end  of  living 
which  man  is  seeking  to  realize  in  his  life  purpose.  Evil, 
then,  will  derive  its  significance  to  man  from  its  relation  to 
the  end  that  he  is  seeking  to  realize.  Practically,  therefore, 
evil  must  be  defined  in  terms  of  the  end  of  living,  and  in 
order  to  determine  what  it  is  we  must  first  reach  some  con- 
ception of  that  end.  But  have  we  not  here  come  upon  a 
problem  of  enormous  difficulty?  Who  is  equal  to  saying 
what  that  end  of  life  is  in  relation  to  which  anything  may 
be  practically  evil  ?  We  may  seek  to  cut  the  knot  by  saying 
that  evil  is  always  something  that  opposes  and  thwarts  the 
realization  of  our  purposes.  And  this  is  so  far  correct; 
evil  does  always  present  itself  as  an  adversary.  But  may 
there  not  be  evil  purposes  and  may  not  that  which  opposes 
them  and  which  stands  in  our  path  with  the  drawn  sword 
be  an  angel  of  good  rather  than  of  evil?  Clearly  there 
may  be  an  evil  self  which  will  seek  to  realize  what 
stands  opposed  to  the  good.  There  may  be  lower  and  more 
perfect  selves  whose  efforts  are,  in  part  at  least,  hostile  to 
the  good  of  the  highest  self.  There  may  then  be  a  conflict 
of  ideals,  and  the  question  arises  as  to  how  this  is  to  be 
resolved  and  the  true  ideal  determined.     Where  are  we  to 


chap.  VI.  MAN'S  ENVIKONMENT.  691 

look,  then,  for  the  true  starting-point  for  denning  what  is 
to  be  regarded  as  evil  in  your  life  struggle  and  mine? 

We  have  already  struck  upon  a  term  which  may  suggest 
the  way  to  a  solution.  We  have  said  that  there  may  be 
an  evil  self  and  a  lower  self  which  may  stand  in  the  way  of 
the  good  of  the  higher  self.  This  has  a  bearing  on  the 
question  of  the  true  end  or  purpose  of  living.  This  end 
will  be  the  purpose  of  some  self,  but  it  will  not  be  any 
purpose  of  any  self.  There  may  be  false  and  defective 
ideals  just  as  there  are  false  and  defective  selves.  That  T 
take  up  a  life-purpose  and  pursue  it  vigorously  and  con- 
sistently to  the  end  does  not  prove  my  purpose  to  be  good, 
for  I  may  be  serving  the  devil  all  my  life.  The  important 
question  with  me  is  what  purpose  I  shall  take  up  as  the 
end  and  guiding  principle  of  my  life-activities.  Here  I 
am  brought  face  to  face  with  the  question  of  my  power  in 
the  sphere  of  ideals  as  well  as  that  of  my  responsibility 
for  the  choice  of  the  right  ideal.  Have  we  the  power  of 
choice  in  the  matter  of  ideals?  Let  us  take  any  appeal 
which  one  man  may  make  to  another.  The  maker  of  the 
appeal  cannot  be  sure  that  the  one  to  whom  he  appeals  will 
be  able  to  perform  the  task  he  is  asking  him  to  undertake, 
especially  if  it  be  a  very  difficult  one.  Let  this  be  an  open 
question,  then,  regarding  the  man's  ability.  What  is  there 
left  as  the  firm  ground  of  the  appeal?  Only  the  presump- 
tion of  the  man's  ability  to  choose  the  task  as  the  aim  of 
his  effort.  The  task  is  not  simply  a  certain  process  of  labor 
which  is  to  be  gone  through.  It  is  an  idea  which  is  to  be 
chosen  by  some  one  and  made  the  end  of  his  striving.  Thus 
the  reformer  approaches  the  inebriate  with  doubt,  perhaps, 
as  to  his  ability  to  overcome  his  thirst  for  drink,  but  with 
the  faith  that  the  man  has  power  to  choose  the  ideal 
of  a  sober  life,  and  this  is  the  ground  of  his  hope.  There 
may  be  pathological  cases  where  even  this  citadel  of  free- 
dom has  been  lost,  and  we  are  not  concerned  here  with  the 
exceptional  instance.  But  in  the  common  instances  of  an 
evil  life,  it  will  be  found  that  the  e:erm  of  manhood  sur- 


692  DEDUCTIONS.  part  m. 

vives  in  the  ability  to  freely  choose  ideals  of  living.  The 
conclusion  we  reach  here  is  one  that  would  follow  logically, 
also,  from  our  doctrine  of  man's  relation  to  nature.  He 
may  be  a  product  and  even  a  victim  of  nature,  but  in  his 
power  of  conceiving  ideal  purposes  lies  the  germ  of  his 
free  agency,  and  so  long  as  this  power  survives  he  will 
retain  his  freedom  in  the  sphere  of  ideals. 

I  take  it,  then,  that  my  power  in  the  choice  of  ideals 
cannot  be  called  in  question,  and  I  may  ask  what  position 
does  this  place  me  in  with  reference  to  the  ends  of  living? 
It  puts  me  clearly  in  the  position  of  one  who  has  the  power 
to  entertain  and  to  choose  to  realize  any  among  the  ideals 
that  may  be  presented  to  me  or  that  may  arise  in  my  con- 
sciousness. I  may  be  bound  to  any  extent  in  the  chains  of 
habit  and  to  any  extent  I  may  be  enslaved  to  my  environ- 
ment, but  I  am  not  forced  by  any  ideal.  Here  is  the  sphere 
of  my  freedom  and  power.  I  may  choose  the  ideal  of  my 
life  and  through  this  ideal  I  may  have  power  over  the 
working  out  of  my  destiny.  I  may  even  break  the  chains 
in  which  evil  habit  has  bound  me.  This  being  true,  we  are 
in  a  position  to  speak  intelligently  about  ends  of  living. 
If  I  may  choose  my  end,  then,  it  will  be  possible  for  me, 
and  perchance  even  necessary,  to  distinguish  between  ends 
which  are  good  and  others  which  are  bad  or  defective.  And 
this  is  just  what  my  experience  teaches  me  I  have  to  do. 
I  find,  in  the  first  place,  that  what  I  call  myself  is  not 
altogether  simple,  but  that  it  is  in  a  sense  a  sphere  of  possi- 
bilities, a  little  universe  of  possible  selves.  And  I  find  that 
what  I  call  my  cardinal  self,  the  self  which  is  final  arbiter 
and  which  chooses  among  the  candidates  that  present  them- 
selves, has  the  task  of  choosing  the  kind  of  self  that  the 
cardinal  self  wills  to  be  and  that  on  this  choice  depends  the 
whole  complexion  of  my  life.  We  have  only  to  study  our 
psychology  in  order  to  see  how  this  plurality  of  self-ideals 
can  arise.  My  cardinal  self  has  the  choice  between  a  purely 
isolated  individual  self  which  is  likely  to  be  egoistic  and 
exclusive,  and  a  more  generous  social,  ethical  and  religious 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT.  693 

self,  which  is  likely  to  be  altruistic  in  its  response  to  its 
relations  to  others.  It  has  also  a  choice  between  the  mere 
fragmentary  and  temporal  self  of  the  present  which  is 
liable  to  be  short-sighted  and  sensuous,  and  a  metaphysical 
self  which  seeks  the  wholeness  of  life  and  whose  perspective 
contains  a  blending  of  the  temporal  and  eternal.  Again,  I 
find  in  myself  an  ideal  which  responds  to  the  requirements 
of  the  ethically  right  and  good  and  another  which  scouts 
righteousness  and  rebels  against  the  law  of  duty.  I  find 
my  cardinal  self  related  to  all  these  and,  in  addition,  to  a 
religious  self  which  loves  God  and  an  irreligious  blasphem- 
ing self  which  turns  away  from  God  and  the  religious  life. 
What  am  I  to  do  in  view  of  such  a  complexity  of  conflicting 
ideals  ?  Truly  my  cardinal  self  will  need  to  be  omniscient 
in  order  to  choose  wisely. 

We  have  seen,  however,  that  it  is  just  this  appearance 
of  a  plurality  of  unorganized  and  apparently  conflicting 
elements  that  everywhere  rouses  science  and  philosophy  to 
their  task  of  organizing  the  world.  And  it  is  just  here  in 
this  exigency  that  we  shall  begin  to  reap  some  fruit  from 
the  labors  of  our  metaphysical  investigation.  If  we  remain 
true  to  our  standpoint  of  experience  and  take  our  stand 
within  experience  and  with  that  cardinal  self  of  which  we 
have  spoken,  we  shall  find  that  we  are  everywhere  in  the 
presence  of  positive  and  negative  ideals ;  the  positive  being 
constructive  and  leading  to  some  rational  end,  while  the 
negative  are  destructive,  negations  of  the  positive,  and  lead 
to  irrational  results.  In  general,  the  positive  will  lead 
to  the  ideal  of  a  world  of  reason  and  order,  while  the  nega- 
tive point  to  the  oppositive  of  this,  the  realm  of  un- 
reason and  chaos.  This  is  a  general  representation,  but  it 
means  that  experience  in  general  presents  a  duality  of 
ideals  to  the  cardinal  self  at  its  center,  and  that  for  every 
ideal  of  good  there  will  be  an  opposing  ideal  of  negation 
and  evil.  At  every  stage  in  his  experience  man  is  con- 
fronted with  double  ideals  and  must  choose  whether  at 
this  point  he  will  become  a  builder  or  a  destroyer.     This 


694  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

will  be  his  fundamental  choice  out  of  which  all  the  other 
issues  of  his  life  will  arise.  Let  us  suppose  a  being  with 
this  cardinal  power  to  become  the  subject  of  a  growing 
experience  like  our  own;  he  will  find  that  at  every  point 
his  present  experience  will  seem  fragmentary  and  unsat- 
isfactory and  will  have  true  significance  only  in  relation 
to  an  ideal  of  completeness  which  the  present  is  going  on 
to  realize.  As  we  have  said,  a  cross-section  of  experience 
anywhere  will  reveal  the  palpitating  heart  of  this  ideal. 
In  view  of  this  his  experience  will  present  itself  as 
a  teleological  process  having  the  ideal  of  a  completed  life 
as  its  goal.  All  his  struggles  will  organize  themselves  into 
a  rational  system  in  view  of  this  ideal,  whereas,  if  he  were 
to  repudiate  this  ideal  or  lose  sight  of  it,  his  struggle  would 
become  irrational  and  his  life  a  riddle.  Again,  if  he  looks 
upon  his  experience  as  a  developing  process  he  will  find 
that  it  is  marked  by  the  growth  of  larger  and  larger  ideals, 
each  one  of  which  embodies  itself  in  a  possible  choosable 
self.  Analysis,  if  he  is  skilled  in  it,  will  reveal  to  the  adult 
a  plurality  of  possible  selves  which,  in  fact,  do  sometimes 
clash  in  the  experience  of  the  best  of  men.  He  will  find 
in  his  consciousness  what  we  may  call  an  isolated  egoistic 
self,  the  kind  of  a  being  a  man  becomes  when  he  attempts 
to  segregate  himself  from  his  family,  social  or  civic  rela- 
tions, and  to  think  and  act  according  to  what  he  calls  his 
own  sweet  will,  which  is  likely  to  be  a  purely  self -regarding 
will  devoted  to  its  own  private  interests  and  enjoyments. 
Associated  with  and  sometimes  colliding  with  this  isolated 
self  is  what  a  man  calls  his  family-self  with  which  the 
points  of  view  and  interests  of  wife  and  children  have 
become  incorporated  so  that  the  family-self  represents  a 
larger  and  richer  being,  the  bearer  of  interests,  duties  and 
responsibilities  to  which  the  narrower  self  is  a  stranger. 
Again,  he  finds  his  selfhood  tending  to  take  on  larger  social 
relations  so  that  it  becomes  the  organ  of  social  reactions  to 
which  the  mere  family-self  is  a  stranger.  And  this  is  true 
of  a  man 's  civic,  ethical  and  religious  experience.    The  car- 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT.  695 

dinal  self  which  is  related  to  all  these  has  the  presentation 
of  progressively  larger  and  richer  embodiments  of  selfhood, 
and  when  man  comes  to  the  study  of  the  subject  from  the 
genetic  point  of  view  he  obtains  an  additional  insight  in 
the  discovery  that  these  different  ideals  of  selfhood  repre- 
sent successive  stages  in  one  process,  the  evolution  of  self- 
hood in  experience.  It  is  the  prerogative  of  a  growing 
experience  to  lead  man  progressively  through  the  stages  of  a 
realizing  process  in  which  he  responds  to  ever  wider  rela- 
tions and  becomes  the  bearer  of  an  ever  enriching  life.  And 
while  it  is  true  that  these  various  standpoints  survive  in 
his  experience,  and  that  each  becomes  a  center  of  a  system 
of  real  and  valid  reactions,  yet  in  a  higher  sense  the  whole 
progressive  experience  in  which  they  emerge  is  one  that 
leads  up  to  the  true  and  final  ideal  of  experience,  that  of  a 
complete  life. 

It  would  seem,  then,  that  the  ideal  of  a  complete  life  is 
the  true  end  which  every  man  should  place  before  him,  and 
that  the  normal  progress  to  this  end  is  one  in  which  he  pro- 
gressively realizes  his  individual,  social,  civic,  ethical  and 
religious  selfhood.  In  other  words,  the  process  of  experience 
which  leads  toward  its  normal  goal,  the  realization  of  a  com- 
plete life,  is  also  the  process  which  leads  a  man  to  respond 
normally  to  the  family,  social,  civic,  ethical  and  religious 
motives  in  his  own  nature  and  to  their  corresponding  rela- 
tions in  the  environment.  It  is  not  contended  here  that  a 
man,  in  order  to  become  a  good  man  at  all,  must  respond 
equally  to  all  these  motives  and  relations,  or  that  he  must 
respond  at  all  to  some  of  them.  A  man  might  be  a  good 
family  man  without  caring  much  for  his  civic  relations, 
and  he  might  be  a  good  citizen  without  responding  vigor- 
ously to  ordinary  social  relations.  A  man  might  be  a  good 
man  morally  and  might  realize  a  high  and  noble  ideal  of 
life  without  being  responsive  to  the  motives  of  religion. 
And  he  might  realize  a  high  religious  ideal,  like  the 
mediaeval  saint,  while  treating  with  neglect  the  ordinary 
family  and  social  motives  and  relations.     It  may  be  said 


696  DEDUCTIONS.  part  m. 

even  further  in  this  same  line,  that  the  ordinary  types 
which  men  realize  in  practical  life  are  those  in  which  some 
one  or  more  of  these  points  of  view  have  become  vitalized 
and  form  the  dominant  character  of  the  individual  life. 
A  man  may  be  conspicuously  a  selfish  egoist,  but  he  may 
also  be  a  shining  example  of  the  man  of  family  and  society 
without  taking  much  interest  in  politics  or  religion.  He 
may  also  be  the  model  public-spirited  citizen  without  caring 
much  for  church  or  social  club.  And  he  may  respond  in 
the  highest  degree  to  the  motives  of  morality,  may  embody 
the  ideals  of  justice  and  righteousness  in  their  highest 
form  in  his  life  and  conduct,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  be 
practically  blind  and  unresponsive  to  the  whole  field  of 
religious  ideas  and  motives.  All  this  is  admitted  and  it  is 
only  contended  here  that  the  true  pathway  to  complete- 
ness of  life  is  through  normal  response  to  the  motives  and 
relations  of  this  progressive  ideal.  It  will  remain  true, 
notwithstanding  the  excellence  of  the  special  types,  that 
the  only  road  to  completeness  of  life  is  the  normal  road  of 
experience,  and  that  only  he  can  hope  for  completeness  who 
responds  to  all  the  motives  and  relations  of  the  process 
through  which  it  comes. 

In  reaching  this  conception  of  the  end  of  man's  life- 
struggle  we  may  not  appear  to  be  in  full  accord  with  what 
seems  to  be  the  accepted  doctrine  of  much  of  the  best  ethics 
of  the  day,  namely,  that  the  end  of  life  is  self-realization. 
The  end  here  favored,  however,  does  not  differ  materially 
from  that  purposed  by  the  ethical  writers,  since  we,  too, 
regard  self-realization  as  the  form  which  the  end  must  take. 
In  other  words,  life  will  be  a  completely  realized  selfhood. 
The  highest  life  takes  the  form  of  self,  and  the  realization 
of  life  is  the  realization  of  self.  ''Why,  then,  not  adopt 
the  term  self-realization,"  the  critic  will  say,  "if  that  is 
what  you  mean,  and  be  done  with  the  discussion?"  The 
answer  to  this  will  have  two  parts.  In  the  first  place,  ethical 
terminology  is  not  as  yet  so  fixed  that  one  may  not  exercise 
a  certain  license  in  the  choice  of  words  even  when  practi- 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIKONMENT.  697 

cally  the  same  thing  is  meant.  Now,  in  company  with 
some  others  the  present  writer  has  a  preference  for  the 
term  completeness  of  life.  But  this  is  a  matter  of  little 
moment.  The  other  consideration  has  more  weight.  Com- 
pleteness of  life  is  more  objective  than  self-realization,  and 
the  end  in  ethics  should  be  stated  as  objectively  as  possible. 
Besides,  without  an  explanatory  clause  self-realization  in- 
vites, in  a  sense,  a  purely  egoistic  construction,  and  while 
this  is  not  meant  by  the  writers  in  question,  yet  by  a  kind 
of  gravitation  the  meaning  of  a  phrase  will  tend  in  the 
direction  of  its  lower  level.  Furthermore,  the  end  of  living 
should  be  so  phrased  that  it  will  be  equally  amenable  to  an 
egoistic  and  an  altruistic  application.  What  is  needed  is 
an  ideal  that  will  fit  both  the  self  and  its  other,  an  ideal 
that  I  can  pursue  for  myself  and  for  my  fellow  man,  an 
ideal,  in  short,  that  will  be  common  property  and  that  will 
include  self-sacrifice  and  self-renunciation  as  well  as  self- 
conserving  and  self-seeking.  Completeness  of  life  seems 
to  fulfill  such  demands  and  it  stands  as  the  natural  cul- 
mination and  crown  of  a  life-process. 

We  return  now  to  the  question  of  man's  struggle  with 
evil.  The  point  of  difficulty  was  to  discover  some  criterion 
that  would  enable  us  to  distinguish  the  evil  from  the  good. 
We  have  found  this  in  the  end  of  the  struggle  which  is  com- 
pleteness of  life ;  and  though  there  would  no  doubt  be  some 
ambiguity  in  this  conception  taken  in  the  abstract,  since  it 
would  still  be  open  to  ask  whether  it  be  the  ideal  of  com- 
pleteness entertained  by  the  saint  or  the  sensualist  that 
is  to  be  taken  as  the  criterion,  yet  we  have  seen  that  this 
uncertainty  largely  disappears  when  we  take  the  end  in  the 
concrete  and  connect  it  vitally  with  the  experience-process 
which  leads  up  to  it.  We  have  seen  how  the  normal  evolu- 
tion of  the  process  of  experience  brings  a  man  into  living 
relations  with  what  we  may  call  his  personal,  family,  social, 
civic,  ethical  and  religious  obligations,  and  also  how  these 
successive  stages  constitute  the  realization  of  a  progressively 
larger  ideal,  until  at  its  climax  the  whole  series  is  included 


698  DEDUCTIONS.  part  in. 

and  unified  in  the  final  ideal  of  completeness  of  life.  It  is 
impossible,  then,  that  a  man  should  realize  the  ideal  of  his 
life,  which  experience  places  before  him,  unless  he  responds 
normally  to  all  its  stages  as  they  develop  in  experience. 
This  is  the  great  lesson  which  the  method  of  experience 
teaches  us  here.  It  connects  men's  effort  with  a  living 
ideal  which  embodies  itself  in  successive  forms  in  response  to 
the  real  relations  of  life,  and  which  finally  culminates  in 
the  ideal  completeness  of  the  process  of  which  it  has  been 
the  inspiration  and  the  aim.  "We  see  that  this  relation  is 
such  as  not  to  force  man  upon  any  Procrustean  bed  where 
the  form  of  a  living  experience  will  be  maimed  and  per- 
verted, but  it  rather  brings  him  into  living  relations  with 
all  the  forces  of  his  environment,  so  that  he  may  respond 
to  the  man  of  Nazareth  and  the  Buddhas  of  his  environ- 
ment as  well  as  to  its  ordinary  social  and  ethical  motives. 
There  is  nothing  in  this  world  to  which  he  may  not  be  kin 
and  respond  to  in  a  living  way. 

Now  the  evil  in  such  a  system  as  this  will  be  that  which 
thwarts  or  opposes  the  realization  of  this  complete  life 
either  in  its  process  or  in  the  end  at  which  it  aims.  The 
notion  of  evil  is  no  longer  indefinable,  then,  but  has  secured 
a  definite  meaning.  The  good  is  not  necessarily  the  actual 
purpose  that  you  or  I  are  seeking  to  realize.  We  may  be 
bad  men  consciously  pursuing  ends  we  feel  to  be  detri- 
mental, or  we  may  be  mistaken  and  our  good  ma}7  be 
partially  or  wholly  illusory.  The  true  end  of  living  is  one 
that  is  objective  to  us  and  which  we  must  determine  by 
using  all  the  resources  which  experience  puts  into  our 
hands.  And  we  may  be  assured  that  no  end  will  be  the 
good  which  we  ought  to  seek  if  it  does  not  harmonize  with 
the  normal  relations  of  a  developing  experience,  and  if  it  is 
not  identical  with  an  ideal  of  completeness  which  includes 
and  unifies  the  whole  process.  Moreover,  it  is  evident  that 
a  good  thus  defined  and  embodied  will  not  be  an  end 
that  will  serve  for  the  mere  isolated  subjective  individual 
and  not  at  the  same  time,  for  his  race.     The  very  mode  in 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT.  699 

which  it  develops,  and  its  relation  to  a  normal  experience, 
secure  for  it  a  common  as  well  as  an  individual  character. 
The  real  ideal  of  living  is  at  the  same  time  all  men's  good 
and  the  good  of  you  and  me  and  of  the  stoker  who  serves 
our  furnace.  To  each  man  it  becomes  a  common  objective 
ideal,  individualized  by  his  own  special  circumstances; 
an  ideal  around  which  he  can  organize  his  work  for  others 
as  well  as  his  efforts  for  his  own  welfare.  The  evil  is,  sub- 
jectively, the  purpose  which  opposes  or  misses  this  objective 
aim,  while,  objectively,  it  is  anything  that  stands  in  the  way 
of  the  efforts  which  man  puts  forth  for  the  realization  of  the 
good  purpose.  A  man  becomes  one  of  the  forces  of  evil 
when  he  opposes  the  good  or  when  he  places  an  imperfect 
and  fragmentary  good  in  the  seat  of  the  ideal.  Objectively 
considered,  evil  is  the  whole  system  of  purposes  and  activi- 
ties that  opposes  the  good  purpose  or  misses  its  aim.  This 
evil  system  stands  in  a  man's  pathway  as  a  foe  to  true 
living,  and  whether  it  take  the  form  of  a  slum  to  be 
abated,  an  organized  wrong  to  be  thrown  down,  a  tempta- 
tion to  be  withstood,  or  a  sinful  passion  to  be  overcome,  my 
relation  to  the  evil  is  the  same ;  I  must  hew  away  manfully 
at  it  until  it  disappears  from  the  earth  or  from  my  own 
nature  and  some  good  has  taken  its  place.  This  effort  of 
mine  may  be  individual,  or  it  may  be  part  of  a  larger 
organized  movement  of  society,  but  in  any  case  the  prin- 
ciple and  the  end  will  be  the  same. 

In  a  larger  sense  man's  relation  to  the  whole  system 
of  things,  which  he  calls  his  environment,  will  be  rationally 
determined  by  this  ideal  of  living.  We  have  seen  how 
he  maintains  his  freedom  in  relation  to  his  environment 
through  his  power  of  ideal  purposive  activity.  But  finite 
purposes  may  be  fragmentary  and  they  may  be  evil  or  may 
miss  their  aim.  A  man  can  only  rationalize  his  world  and 
achieve  freedom  in  the  highest  sense  when  he  has  conceived 
the  ideal  of  completeness  of  life  in  the  way  pointed  out 
above,  and  has  made  it  the  supreme  and  all-comprehending 
purpose  of  his   activity.     With  this   dominating  purpose, 


700  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

then,  as  the  guiding  star  of  his  life-activity  he  is  enabled 
to  relate  himself  to  the  whole  field  of  his  experience  in  the 
way  God  is  conceived  as  relating  himself  to  the  world. 
In  fact,  his  life  becomes  a  species  of  divine  life  and  each 
element  of  his  world  tends  to  fall  into  harmonious  relations 
with  every  other  element  and  with  the  whole.  We  are  here 
picturing  the  ideal  to  which  all  well-directed  efforts  will 
tend,  but  which  no  life,  perhaps,  will  ever  completely 
fulfill.  The  ordinary  life  of  man  proceeds  for  the  most 
part  on  a  lower  level,  a  field  of  manifold  efforts  and  frag- 
mentary ideals,  where  it  resolves  itself  into  a  fight  against 
this  or  that  concrete  evil  or  into  an  effort  to  achieve  this 
or  that  particular  good  in  life.  It  is  hard  to  maintain  a 
sense  of  the  unity  of  life  in  this  field  of  unmitigated  par- 
ticularity, but  it  is  here  especially,  where  its  absence  seems 
to  be  most  conspicuous,  that  the  most  efficient  service  of  a 
true  ideal  of  living  may  be  rendered.  If  the  true  good  and 
goal  of  living  is  the  ideal  of  completeness  of  life,  and  if  this 
ideal  is  to  be  realized  by  responding  to  the  successive 
requirements  which  arise  in  a  normal  experience,  then  there 
can  be  nothing  in  true  living  that  is  foreign  to  the  ideal. 
Just  because  of  the  fragmentary  character  of  my  ordinary 
experience,  does  it  stand  in  living  need  of  the  unifying 
ideal,  and  it  is  just  here  in  the  field  of  everyday  plurality, 
where  I  am  liable  to  lose  myself  in  the  very  multitude  of 
details  and  my  experience  threatens  to  fall  into  fragments, 
that  a  strong  grasp  on  the  ideal  proves  my  salvation  and  I 
feel  that  its  power  in  my  life  has  made  me  free. 

The  lesson  we  learn  here  is  that  man  is  the  worker-out 
of  his  own  destiny.  He  is  not  the  victim  of  any  environ- 
ment, but  has  in  him  the  power  of  a  free  agent  and  may 
react  upon  his  environment  and  render  it  more  serviceable 
to  his  needs.  We  moderns  need  to  learn  this  lesson,  since  we 
have  become  so  accustomed  to  the  contemplation  of  the  vast 
forces  of  the  world  which  surrounds  us  and  plays  upon  us 
that  the  profession  of  man 's  helplessness  has  taken  on  some- 
thing of  the  sanctity  of  a  religious  cult.     It  is  well,  there- 


chap.  vi.  MAN'S  ENVIRONMENT.  701 

fore,  to  have  the  charm  broken  and  man  the  captive  rein- 
stated in  his  true  franchise  as  a  free  agent  and  a  master 
of  his  environment.  The  last  word  here,  however,  shall 
not  be  a  paean  to  man's  mastery  over  the  forces  that  sur- 
round him,  but  rather  a  testimonial  to  his  real  need  of  his 
environment.  The  dependence  of  man  on  his  environment 
is  not  altogether  one  that  can  be  construed  in  terms  of 
enslavement.  It  is  only  an  evil  environment  that  enslaves, 
whereas,  as  we  have  seen,  the  very  environment  that  pro- 
duces him  may  be  also  the  condition  of  his  true  freedom. 
It  is  another  side  of  this  same  relation  that  we  wish  to 
develop  in  conclusion.  The  vision  we  have  is  that  of  man's 
environment  as  tributary  to  his  development.  It  is,  there- 
fore a  vision  of  man's  dependence  on  his  environment  for 
the  means  of  realizing  his  own  good.  We  have  seen  how  the 
whole  life-process  in  one  aspect  of  it  arises  as  a  progressive 
response  to  the  real  relations  of  the  environment.  Man's 
dependence  arises,  then,  out  of  the  very  nature  of  the 
situation  and  man's  need  of  his  environment  as  tributary 
to  his  development  becomes  apparent.  How,  then,  shall 
we  specify  these  needs  so  that  he  may  take  account  of 
his  indebtedness?  We  can  only  enter  upon  one  line  of 
specification  here,  as  showing  not  only  how  his  needs 
are  declared  but  also  how  they  are  satisfied.  We  say  that 
there  is  no  such  thing  as  an  isolated  self-sufficient  individ- 
ual in  the  world.  No  man  liveth  to  himself,  but,  in  the 
course  of  a  normal  experience,  he  becomes  the  bearer  of 
family,  social,  civic  and  ethical,  not  to  mention  religious, 
relations.  These  bind  him  to  his  kind  and  to  God  and  in 
a  vital  sense  render  him  dependent  on  his  kind  and  on 
God.  This  dependence  expresses  itself  in  two  ways  in 
his  experience.  In  the  first  place,  out  of  his  living  re- 
sponses to  these  relations  arise  the  fundamental  prin- 
ciples by  which  his  conduct  is  guided  and  determined  as 
normal.  We  have  seen  in  another  place  how  out  of  the 
economic  phase  of  his  relation  to  his  fellows;  in  fact,  out 
of  the  very  collision  of  group  with  group  in  the  struggle 


702  DEDUCTIONS.  part  hi. 

for  maintenance,  there  emerge  into  consciousness  those  in- 
tuitions of  justice  and  right  and  sympathy  which  constitute 
the  guiding  principles  of  so  much  of  his  life.  We  may 
generalize  the  example  here  and  say  that  it  is  not  by  any 
power  of  a  priori  insight  which  man  possesses,  but  rather 
through  the  touch  of  actual  experience,  and  the  taste  of 
the  actual  struggle  of  life,  that  what  we  call  the  funda- 
mental principles  of  conduct  in  every  sphere  are  discovered. 
In  this  sense  the  principles  which  are  to  guide  him  in  his 
normal  progress  through  the  world  arise  out  of  that  progress 
itself.  And  this  is  a  striking  illustration  of  man's  need  of 
his  environment.  He  stands  in  need  of  the  nature  that 
nourishes  him ;  of  his  fellows  who  surround  him ;  of  God 
who  stands  in  transcendent  relation  to  him  and  yet  enters 
vitally  into  his  life.  Without  the  ministrations  of  his  en- 
vironment he  would  be  lacking  in  those  guiding  intuitions 
without  which  his  life  would  be  like  a  rudderless  craft 
on  an  unnavigable  sea.  Again,  he  is  dependent  on  his 
environment  for  the  power  and  inspiration  needed  for  the 
realization  of  his  oavii  ideals.  Let  the  man  who  has  been 
accustomed  to  the  open  life  of  society  isolate  himself  from 
his  fellows  and  endeavor  to  carry  out  his  ideals  in  con- 
nection with  the  life  of  the  solitary.  He  will  find  that  the 
stimulus  of  the  social  medium  has  been  a  powerful  agent 
in  the  activity  of  his  life.  The  family  man  temporarily 
bereft  of  the  society  of  wife  and  children  experiences 
inevitably  a  kind  of  atrophy  in  his  family  affections  and 
reactions.  In  a  much  more  striking  manner  the  citizen 
without  a  country,  or  the  religious  devotee  without  a 
church,  finds  the  sources  of  his  ordinary  patriotic  and 
devotional  experience  gradually  drying  up.  So  the  man 
who  becomes  misanthropic  loses  the  spring  of  activity  which 
comes  out  of  sympathetic  relations  with  his  fellows,  and  the 
man  who  becomes  atheistic  cuts  himself  off  from  the  sources 
of  divine  strength. 

In  order  to  realize  his  destiny  in  the  world  man  needs  to 
recognize  his  dependence  on  nature,  for  it  is  through  this 


chap.  vi.  MAX'S  ENVIRONMENT.  703 

recognition  that  nature  is  able  to  become  the  nourishing 
mother  of  his  freedom.  He  needs  to  recognize  his  depend- 
ence on  his  fellow  men,  since  ont  of  his  relations  with 
his  fellows  spring  the  guiding  principles  of  his  whole 
social  and  moral  life,  and  it  is  in  his  relations  with  his  kind 
that  he  connects  also  with  the  most  vital  springs  of  action. 
He  needs  to  recognize  his  dependence  on  God,  since  it 
is  in  God  that  he  finds  the  ultimate  sources  of  his  being  and 
it  is  from  his  relation  to  God  that  there  arises  in  his  life  the 
whole  revelation  of  his  connection  with  the  transcendent,  the 
whole  vision  of  divine  fellowship.  It  is  only  in  his  relation 
to  God  that  the  unity  and  rationality  of  his  own  life  be- 
come apparent,  and  it  is  in  God  that  the  finite  must  ever 
seek  for  the  most  powerful  springs  of  energy  and  hope  in 
life.  And  finally,  in  view  of  man's  struggle  with  evil  and 
especially  in  view  of  his  own  moral  weakness  and  sinful- 
ness, he  needs  the  divine  in  its  function  of  helpfulness.  A 
finite  being,  working  out  his  destiny  in  an  evil  world  and 
struggling,  sometimes  hopelessly,  with  his  sins  and  tempta- 
tions, is  in  need  not  only  of  God,  but  of  the  Christ,  for  it 
is  only  in  his  conscious  relation  to  the  divine  helper  of  men 
that  he  can  be  assured  that  his  own  life  will  not  fail  and 
that  he  will  stand  in  his  lot  at  the  end  of  his  days. 


SUPPLEMENTARY  CHAPTER. 

MAN  AND   HIS  BELIEFS. 

We  have  in  the  foregoing  discussions  endeavored  to  work 
out  in  detail  a  demonstration  of  the  truth  of  the  claim  we 
have  made  for  philosophy ;  namely,  that  its  central  business 
is  the  unification  of  truth.  In  the  course  of  this  demon- 
stration it  has  become  clear,  we  are  led  to  hope,  that  this 
unity  is  achieved  from  one  point  of  view,  only  in  a  synthesis 
of  scientific  and  metaphysical  insights  and  methods,  while 
from  another  point  of  view  it  is  reached  through  a  synthesis 
of  knowledge  and  belief.  Now,  it  is  from  the  standpoint 
of  this  latter  synthesis  that  this  supplementary  chapter 
has  been  written.  We  have  already  given  our  reasons  for  tak- 
ing as  the  criterion  of  belief,— as  that  which  distinguishes 
its  judgment  fundamentally  from  a  judgment  of  knowl- 
edge,—the  fact  that  its  determining  consideration  is  some 
relation  which  it  bears  to  practical  good  rather  than  to 
theoretic  truth.  Let  the  theoretic  data  be  what  they  may, 
if  they  of  themselves  are  not  sufficient  to  work  conviction, 
and  the  decision  be  ultimately  determined  by  a  practical 
motive,  then  the  ensuing  state  of  mind  will  be  belief  rather 
than  a  form  of  theoretic  certitude.  We  have  here,  then, 
in  the  motive  of  belief,  a  phase  of  what  James  calls  the 
1 '  will  to  believe, ' '  and  the  points  of  doctrine  which  we  wish 
to  establish  in  these  concluding  paragraphs  are,  (1)  the 
limit  of  will  in  matters  of  belief,  and  (2)  the  validity  of  the 
will  to  believe.     As  regards  the  first  point,  it  is  evident  that 

704 


BELIEF  AND  CEETITUDE.  705 

the  mere  will  to  believe  is  not  an  adequate  ground  for 
belief,  for  the  simple  reason  that  mere  choosing  to  believe 
cannot  produce  real  conviction.  The  mere  will  to  believe 
can  at  best  give  rise  to  a  species  of  make-believe.  The  will 
that  engenders  belief  will  always  be  a  will  that  embodies  a 
wish.  The  real  will  to  believe  is  the  wish  to  believe,  and 
wish  is  the  child  of  desire  or  interest.  Now,  to  refer  a 
conviction  that  rests  on  a  theoretic  interest  to  the  will  to 
believe  is,  of  course,  folly.  It  is  only  when  the  interest  is 
practical  that  the  attitude  arising  can  be  characterized  as 
will  to  believe.  Every  belief,  then,  in  so  far  as  it  is  a  true 
belief  and  not  a  theoretic  judgment  in  disguise,  will  be  a 
species  of  the  will  to  believe.  But  the  proposition  is  not 
simply  convertible.  We  cannot  say  that  every  will  to 
believe  gives  rise  to  a  belief  either  in  fact  or  by  right. 
It  thus  becomes  clear  that  the  will  has  a  limit  in  matters 
of  belief,  so  that  no  one  of  us  by  willing  can  add  a  cubit 
to  his  stature.  When,  then,  does  the  will  to  believe  carry 
with  it  the  power  to  constitute  a  real  belief  and  not  a  mere 
make-believe?  The  answer  is  not  far  to  seek.  When  the 
will  to  believe  embodies  a  real  desire  or  interest  of  the 
subject,  so  that  the  subject's  welfare  or  happiness  is  in 
some  way  staked  on  the  truth  of  what  is  willed.  In  this 
case,  provided  the  desire  be  sufficiently  strong  and  per- 
sistent, and  provided  there  are  no  opposing  considerations 
of  a  theoretic  character  strong  enough  to  overcome  the 
practical  motive,  a  genuine  individual  belief  will  arise. 
Such  a  belief,  however,  may  be  strictly  limited  to  the 
individual  mind  in  which  it  has  arisen.  A  belief,  in  order 
to  propagate  itself  and  become  general,  must  rest  on  a 
commonalty  of  interest.  There  arises,  then,  a  distinction 
between  in  dividual  and  common  beliefs,  the  former  belong- 
ing to  the  idiosyncrasies  of  individuals  and  being  incom- 
municable, the  latter  being  communicable  and  propagating 
themselves  through  communities. 

We  are  not  concerned  here  with  the  purely  individual 
forms  of  belief,  but  rather  with  that  species  of  belief  which 
45 


706  SUPPLEMENTARY  CHAPTER. 

is  shared  in  by  communities  of  individuals.  Now,  it  is  evi- 
dent that  a  belief,  in  order  to  take  on  the  communal  form, 
must  submit  to  some  of  the  tests  which  we  apply  to  theoretic 
propositions.  The  interest  must,  in  the  first  place,  be  real. 
The  belief  must  also  bear  the  social  test;  it  must  be  a 
common  interest,  felt,  though  perhaps  not  equally,  by  all 
the  members  of  the  community.  When  a  belief  thus 
becomes  communal,  the  very  fact  that  it  expresses  a  com- 
mon interest  or  desire  clothes  it,  in  its  relation  to  the  in- 
dividual consciousness,  with  the  force  of  a  demand.  If, 
now,  we  take  our  start  from  this  result,  namely,  that  the 
social  beliefs,  by  which  we  mean  those  that  are  common  and 
not  individual,  are  enforced  by  demands  which  remove  them 
from  the  sphere  of  the  arbitrary  and  capricious,  our  prob- 
lem will  then  take  the  form  of  an  inquiry  as  to  whether 
there  maj^  be  beliefs  resting  on  demands  that  can  be 
accepted  as  possessing  real  epistemological  value.  In  other 
words,  may  there  be  demand-  or  interest- judgments  the 
denial  of  which  would  give  rise  on  the  practical  side  to  a 
disturbance  corresponding  in  gravity  to  a  logical  con- 
tradiction in  the  field  of  theoretic  truth?  Let  us  ask,  in 
the  first  place,  what  conceivable  conditions  would  fulfill  this 
requirement,  and,  in  the  second  place,  whether  any  of  our 
practical  judgments  rest  on  such  conditions.  The  first  part 
of  our  question  will  not  be  so  difficult  to  answer  as  it  seems. 
We  have  only  to  remember  that  the  belief  we  are  consider- 
ing rests  on  some  common  interest  or  demand,  in  order  to  be 
convinced  that  the  direct  ground  of  belief  is  some  practical 
good  which  the  object  of  the  belief  directly  subserves.  If  it 
were  not  for  this  there  would  be  no  sufficient  reason  for  the 
existence  of  the  beliefs.  On  the  other  hand,  if  these  objects 
were  objects  of  knowledge,  there  would  be  no  occasion  for 
the  beliefs.  Taking  our  stand  on  this  notion  of  practical 
good  we  have  only  to  determine  how  vital  it  must  be  in 
order  to  create  a  demand  that  shall  have  epistemological 
value  or  its  equivalent.  Can  there  be  a  practical  situation 
that  will  present  the  counterpart  in  the  field  of  will,  of  a 


BELIEF  AND  CERTITUDE.  707 

logical  contradiction  in  the  field  of  intellect?  We  can 
think  of  one,  a  situation  in  which  what  we  acknowledge  to 
be  the  highest  issues  of  life  are  at  stake  and  in  which  for 
the  realization  of  these  issues  in  the  form  of  the  highest 
good,  or  the  most  complete  life,  the  objects  of  the  belief  are 
essentially  necessary  conditions.  If  such  a  belief,  which 
is  clearly  conceivable,  should  prove  to  be  actual,  the  re- 
quirements would  be  fulfilled  in  its  case  and  we  could  say 
of  it  that  our  certitude  regarding  it  is  as  sure  a  guarantee 
of  its  existence  as  would  be  a  certitude  of  knowledge  rest- 
ing on  theoretic  grounds. 

We  have  only  to  consider  some  of  the  fundamental  meta- 
physical convictions  of  the  race  in  order  to  reach  the  answer 
we  are  seeking.  Here  the  deep-seeing  Kant  may  well  be  our 
guide,  since  he  has  surely  interpreted  the  profounder  con- 
sciousness of  men  correctly  in  selecting  as  the  three  constitu- 
tional beliefs  which  the  race  is  most  tenacious  in  clinging  to, 
those  which  assert  the  freedom  and  immortality  of  the  soul 
and  the  existence  of  God.  Kant,  as  we  know,  after  his  fail- 
ure to  discover  adequate  theoretic  data  for  the  assertion  of 
these  objects  as  objects  of  knowledge,  found  in  the  ethical 
consciousness,  in  the  demands  of  the  moral  reason  or  will, 
grounds  that  justify  him  in  postulating  them  as  necessary 
conditions  of  moral  good.  We  do  not  propose  here  to  con- 
sider the  value  of  the  Kantian  doctrine,  but  rather  to  deal 
with  the  situation  which  Kant  has  helped  us  to  discover  and 
formulate,  on  its  own  merits.  Taking,  for  example,  the  prob- 
lem of  freedom,  which  is  simply  the  question  whether  man's 
agency  respecting  his  actions  is  real  or  only  a  phase  of 
natural  causation,  we  have  already  developed  some  theoretic 
grounds  for  an  affirmative  answer.  For  example,  in  the 
second  division  of  this  treatise  we  were  led  to  stake  the 
issue  between  freedom  and  natural  causation  on  the  moral 
situation  that  arises  when  duty  and  inclination  come  into 
conflict  and  in  which  man  finds  himself  able  to  decide  against 
inclination.  We  chose  this  as  the  only  crucial  test  which 
our  experience  gives  us,  but  as  one  that  is  sufficient  to  prove 


708  SUPPLEMENTAEY   CHAPTER. 

the  fact  of  an  agency  that  cannot  be  accounted  for  under 
the  rubric  of  natural  causation.  In  the  third  part  of 
the  present  work,  in  treating  of  man's  agency  we  have 
dealt  with  it  more  broadly,  taking  the  fact  that  man's 
volitions  in  his  social,  ethical  and  religious  experiences  are 
determined  by  the  function  of  an  ideal;  this  ideal  always 
embodying  the  telos  or  end-consideration  in  view  of  which 
decision  is  reached.  The  nerve  of  the  argument  there  was 
that,  while  natural  causation  may  explain  habit  and  the 
habitual  in  experience,  when  it  comes  to  the  fact  of  accom- 
modation in  which  progress  is  made,  some  higher  form  of 
agency  is  needed  and  this  is  secured  by  the  presence  of  the 
ideal.  Now,  we  do  not  propose  to  consider  how  far  the 
theoretic  considerations  here  insisted  on,  go  toward  con- 
stituting a  theoretic  proof  of  freedom.  They  certainly  do 
prove  that  the  doctrine  of  freedom  is  reasonable  and  that 
no  theoretic  refutation  of  it  is  possible.  When,  however, 
we  consider  the  fact  that  it  is  only  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  practical  consciousness  that  the  motive  for  the 
assertion  of  freedom  arises,  it  is  natural  to  conclude  that 
the  strongest  evidence  of  freedom  will  come  from  the  same 
quarter.  Let  us  suppose,  then,  that  the  ethical  motive  and 
interest  have  been  eliminated  from  the  problem.  What 
we  have  left  is  simply  the  proof  that  man  is  formally  free 
but  has  no  practical  motive  for  asserting  real  freedom  as  an 
important  fact  in  his  world  of  experience.  It  is  only  when 
the  pressure  of  duty  arises  and  man  is  brought  face  to  face 
with  the  discovery  that  he  has  an  ideal  destiny  pressing 
upon  him,  that  he  awakes  to  the  necessity  of  exercising  his 
real  freedom  and  asserting  for  it  the  right  of  way  in  his 
world  and  in  experience.  It  becomes  evident,  therefore, 
that  man's  freedom,  in  so  far  as  he  asserts  it  as  an  actual 
possession,  is  assured  to  him  on  practical  rather  than  on 
theoretic  grounds,  and  is  held,  therefore,  as  a  belief  rather 
than  as  a  certitude  of  knowledge. 

Take  as  another  example,  for  which  we  also  have  high 
authority,   man's   belief   in   the   existence   of   an    all-wise 


BELIEF  AND  CEETITUDE.  709 

and  beneficent  God.  We  call  this  a  belief  here  not- 
withstanding the  fact  that  it  has  been  one  of  the  principal 
aims  of  the  whole  foregoing  treatise  to  unfold  the  theoretic 
grounds  for  asserting  the  existence  of  such  a  being.  The 
proof  may  be  stated  briefly  in  the  following  proposition. 
All  those  metaphysical  considerations  which  go  to  establish 
the  fact  that  the  world  is  dominated  by  design  and  that  the 
central  and  fundamental  agency  in  it  is  one  of  prevision 
and  purpose,  are  also  considerations  which  go  to  establish 
the  theoretic  certaintj^  of  the  existence  of  God.  Now,  with- 
out receding  in  any  way  from  this  conclusion,  it  still  remains 
true  that  the  existence  of  God  only  becomes  vital  as  a  prac- 
tical belief  rather  than  as  a  theoretic  certitude.  Why  is  this  ? 
The  reason  is  not  far  to  seek.  Any  proof  of  the  divine 
existence  from  which  the  practical  motives  and  interests  of 
morality  and  religion  have  been  excluded  will  be  purely 
formal  and  there  will  be  lacking  on  the  theoretic  side  any 
motive  for  taking  it  very  seriously  or  for  regarding  it  as 
anything  more  than  a  more  or  less  interesting  speculation. 
If,  however,  we  open  the  sluice-gates  and  turn  on  the  tides 
of  ethical  and  religious  motives  and  interests,  the  machinery 
begins  to  move  in  earnest  and  the  mill-stones  of  our  logic 
find  themselves  grinding  a  real  grist.  For  in  the  presence 
of  the  practical  issues  the  proof  becomes  vital  rather  than 
merely  formal,  and  the  conviction  which  binds  our  souls  to 
God  takes  the  shape  of  a  practical  belief  rather  than  a  pale 
certitude  of  theoretic  knowledge. 

Let  us  consider,  finally,  the  question  of  the  immortality 
of  the  soul.  Kant  found  the  grounds  for  postulating  this 
as  a  truth  of  the  practical  reason,  in  the  fact  that  morality 
imposes  on  man  an  infinite  ideal  which  can  be  realized  only 
in  an  endless  life.  In  the  present  treatise  an  effort  has 
been  made  to  develop  the  grounds  of  a  theoretic  proof  of 
immortality.  Without  going  into  detail,  the  reasoning 
may  be  condensed  as  follows :  A  profound  analysis  of 
experience  reveals  the  fact  that  man  is  a  spiritual  being 
whose  selfhood  is  fundamental  and  whose  most  character- 


710  SUPPLEMENTARY   CHAPTER. 

istic  and  essential  activity  expresses  itself  in  the  form,  of 
previsional  and  purposive  agency.  This  interpretation  of 
man's  nature  and  agency  brings  his  life  into  vital  relation 
with  the  purpose  that  dominates  the  world  and  consequently 
into  relation  with  the  being  in  whom  this  purpose  is  em- 
bodied. And  the  theoretic  proof  of  immortality  completes 
itself  in  the  doctrine  that  the  divine  life  stands  related  to 
the  human  as  the  fullness  of  the  ideal,  and  as  the  life  in 
which  all  the  fragmentariness  and  imperfection  of  this 
present  life  will  be  transcended  and  cured.  The  theoretic 
proof  of  immortality  consists,  therefore,  in  showing  that 
from  the  theoretic  standpoint  it  supplies  the  ideally  rational 
doctrine  of  life.  But  now,  when  this  proof  has  been  com- 
pleted and  it  stands  there  in  its  formal  perfection,  it  cannot 
be  said  that  man,  apart  from  his  moral  and  religious  mo- 
tives and  interests,  has  any  very  strong  reason  for  asserting 
its  reality.  It  is  only  when  his  moral  destiny  presses  upon 
him  and  he  begins  to  respond  to  a  life-ideal  which  has  no 
temporal  limitations  that  the  formal  doctrine  of  immortality 
becomes  precious  to  him.  And  more  especially  is  it  when 
the  religious  motives  begin  to  vitalize  and  the  soul  is 
brought  into  living  fellowship  with  God,  that  his  own  life 
begins  to  appear  to  him  sub  specie  aeternitatis  and  he  comes 
to  believe  in  his  soul  as  the  bearer  of  an  eternal  destiny. 

Now  in  the  light  of  the  foregoing  it  will  not  be  so  very 
difficult,  we  think,  to  determine,  approximately  at  least,  the 
limit  of  will  in  the  determination  of  belief.  It  will  be 
clear  that  will  cannot  determine  indiscriminately  all  sorts 
of  beliefs  in  view  of  all  sorts  of  theoretic  situations.  If, 
for  example,  we  were  asked  to  believe  something  in  the 
interests  of  practical  good  which  actually  involved  a  logical 
contradiction,  we  should  refuse  to  do  so  with  an  energy 
proportionate  to  the  clearness  with  which  we  realized  the 
contradiction.  Sheer  will  cannot  overcome  a  primary 
species  of  theoretic  certitude,  whether  that  species  be 
empirical  or  rational.  Thus  if  either  physics  or  mathe- 
matics has  reached  clear  demonstrations  of  truth  in  its 


BELIEF  AND  CERTITUDE.  711 

own  field  it  will  be  impossible  for  will,  legislating  in 
the  interests  of  the  practical,  to  force  conviction  contra 
these  demonstrations.  If,  then,  it  were  possible  on  theoretic 
grounds  to  develop  a  conclusive  disproof  of  the  proposition 
for  which  practical  belief  is  asked,  we  should  then  be  facing 
a  situation  in  which  the  theoretic  proof  would  have  the 
right  of  way  and  no  belief  would  have  any  right  to  assert 
itself  against  it.  The  only  situation  in  which  it  is  conceiva- 
ble that  the  will  to  believe  could  determine  real  and  genuine 
conviction,  would  be  (1)  in  cases  where  there  is  absolutely 
no  theoretic  evidence  either  for  or  against  and  where  the 
sole  reason  for  asserting  it  to  be  true  is  practical;  (2)  in 
cases  where  there  is  a  theoretic  balance  in  favor  of  an  asser- 
tion but  one  that  falls  short  of  formal  proof;  (3)  in  cases 
where  the  theoretic  evidence  in  favor  of  the  assertion  is 
formally  complete.  Comparing  these  three  cases,  it  will  be 
clear  that  where  there  is  absolutely  no  theoretic  evidence 
either  for  or  against,  a  practical  belief  cannot  be  very 
strongly  grounded.  For  example,  take  the  question  whether 
some  of  the  planets,  of  whose  conditions  we  have  no  knowl- 
edge, are  inhabited.  In  such  a  case  we  might  experience, 
subjectively,  the  will  to  believe  in  its  maximum  strength, 
without  being  able  to  banish  a  sense  of  the  complete  incerti- 
tude of  our  belief.  The  second  species  of  belief,  as  being  sup- 
ported by  theoretic  considerations  falling  short  of  formal 
completeness,  would  be  stronger  than  the  first,  inasmuch  as 
the  theoretic  data  would  establish  at  least  a  presumption  in 
favor  of  the  object  believed  in.  Its  theoretic  contingency 
would,  however,  be  an  element  of  weakness,  and  the  practi- 
cal situation  would  need  to  be  one  of  clear  practical  neces- 
sity in  order  to  overcome  this  contingency  and  ground  a 
genuine  practical  belief.  No  doubt  many  of  our  most  vital 
and  necessary  beliefs  fall  under  this  category,  which  must 
be  taken  as  providing  a  legitimate  field  for  the  exercise 
of  the  will  to  believe.  The  third  category, — that  of  formal 
theoretic  completeness,— is  one  in  which  the  highest  degrees 
of    practical    certitude    are    clearly    attainable.      To    the 


712  SUPPLEMENTARY   CHAPTER. 

objection  that  the  practical  conviction  here,  however  strong, 
is  useless,  inasmuch  as  the  ground  has  already  been  covered 
by  the  theoretic  proof,  the  answer  has  been  given  in  part. 
In  the  first  place,  it  is  not  certain  that  any  theoretic 
proof  would  be  forthcoming  were  it  not  for  the  pressure 
of  the  practical  motives.  Again,  it  has  been  shown  that  a 
formal  theoretic  proof  abstracted  from  moral  and  religious 
considerations  would  not  be  likely  to  work  a  very  strong 
degree  of  conviction.  The  living  content  of  the  certitude 
would  after  all  be  moral  and  religious  and  would  translate 
it  into  a  form  of  practical  belief. 

There  is,  however,  more  to  be  said  in  this  connection. 
We   have    used   the    phrase    formally    complete.     Now,    a 
theoretic  proof  would  be  formally  complete  if  it  amounted 
to  a  demonstration  so  that  the  object  demonstrated  could 
be  no  longer  doubted.     But  as  a  matter  of  fact,  a  proof  may 
be  formally  complete  without  carrying  with  it   any  such 
coerciveness.     For  example,  a  proof  is  formally  complete 
that  demonstrates  the  complete  rationality  of  a  judgment 
whether  it  be  one  of  knowledge  or  of  belief.     Thus,  that  the 
soul  should  be  immortal  or  that  God  should  exist,  may  be 
shown  on  theoretic  grounds  to  be  in  accordance  with  the 
highest  reason.     And  there  are  many  who  will  concede  this 
while  denying  to  it  the  higher  certainty  of  theoretic  proof. 
It  is  important  to  have  it  understood  at  this  point,  however, 
that  this  lower  form  of  theoretic  certitude  supplies  all  the 
theoretic  support  which  the  beliefs  we  have  been  treating 
require.     If  it  be  conceded  in  the  case  of  either  freedom, 
immortality  or  God's  existence,  that  the  theoretic  evidence 
is  complete  in  the  sense  of  showing  that  the  judgment  in 
which  it  is  affirmed  is  completely  rational  and,  in  fact,  in- 
volves a  higher  rational  ideal  of  existence  than  would  be 
possible   without   it,   then   the   belief   has   secured   all   the 
theoretic  endorsement  it  needs.     It  may  still  be  a  debatable 
question  on  the  grounds  of  abstract  theory,  but  it  is  trans- 
latable into  the  certitude  of  a  practical  belief  when  the 


BELIEF  AND  CERTITUDE.  713 

force  of  the  moral  and  religious  motives  are  brought  to  bear 
on  it. 

Kant,  in  his  practical  philosophy,  affirms  that  when 
a  moral  judgment  possesses  the  practical  necessity  that 
elevates  it  into  a  postulate  of  moral  reason,  it  thereby 
becomes  const ilul in  ,  and  by  that  he  means  that  it  becomes 
a  sufficient  guarantee  of  the  reality  of  its  object.  We  are 
prepared  here  to  make  a  corresponding  claim  for  those 
practical  beliefs  which,  fulfilling  the  criteria  of  practical 
postulates,  receive  also,  as  we  have  pointed  out,  the  formal 
endorsement  of  the  theoretic  reason.  And  in  order  that 
this  claim  may  not  be  misunderstood  we  shall  add  a  few 
sentences  here  to  what  has  already  been  said  on  the  subject 
of  formal  rational  proof.  What  we  mean  by  that  phrase 
in  this  connection  is  precisely  what  Kant  meant  in  his  con- 
tention that  the  idea  of  God  commends  itself  as  in  the 
highest  degree  rational.  We  mean  by  it  that  consistency 
with  a  rational  conception  of  the  world  which  is  involved  in 
the  perception  of  the  fact  that  what  is  affirmed  in  our  judg- 
ment is  in  the  highest  sense  reasonable,  so  that  were  the  only 
criterion  to  be  consulted  in  working  out  a  world-scheme, 
the  test  of  rationality,  the  object  asserted  in  our  judg- 
ment would  be  entitled  to  the  highest  credence.  Now,  it 
is  clear  in  the  light  of  all  the  data  of  experience  with  which 
we  may  acquaint  ourselves  through  science  and  philosoplry, 
that  the  judgments  which  affirm  freedom,  the  immortal  life 
and  God,  embody  the  highest  dictates  of  rationality.  But 
were  these  judgments  considered  as  mere  theoretic  propo- 
sitions altogether  apart  from  practical  demands,  there  is  no 
reason  for  thinking  that  they  would  ever  possess  for  us 
more  than  formal  or  speculative  interest  and  value.  And 
in  view  of  the  tendency  of  so  much  of  our  everyday  expe- 
rience, to  blind  us  to  the  higher  insights  out  of  which  such 
judgments  spring,  sceptical  indifference  and  perhaps  dog- 
matic unbelief  would  almost  inevitably  ensue.  It  is  only 
when  we  relate  these  judgments  to  the  exigencies  and  de- 
mands of  morality  and  religion  that  they  acquire  the  robust- 


714  SUPPLEMENTAEY  CHAPTEE. 

ness  of  concrete  certitudes,  and  theoretic  indifference  is 
turned  into  positive  conviction  by  the  clinch  of  practical 
necessity. 

"We  reach  the  conclusion,  then,  that  while  in  general  the 
mere  will  to  believe  is  not  an  adequate  ground  for  con- 
viction, yet  there  is  in  the  field  of  moral  and  religious 
experience  a  legitimate  sphere  for  judgments  of  the  will. 
It  is  in  this  field  that  the  most  fundamental  convictions  of 
men  are  to  be  found.  And  it  is  in  dealing  with  these 
convictions  that  the  very  last  resources  of  philosophy  are 
called  into  exercise.  If  our  appeal  in  philosophy  be  to 
pure  theoretic  considerations,  then,  however  reasonable 
these  convictions  may  seem,  they  are,  nevertheless,  found 
to  transcend  demonstration,  and  a  kind  of  scepticism  of  the 
reason  results.  But  when  we  admit  the  validity  of  practi- 
cal necessity,  of  moral  and  religious  demands,  as  grounds 
for  belief,  this  scepticism  is  cured  and  it  begins  to  be  evi- 
dent that  these  convictions  lay  hold  on  the  foundations  of 
the  world.  In  their  light,  men  see  light  and  are  able  to 
walk  the  earth  as  free  sons  of  the  eternal  and  as  heirs  of 
the  immortal  life. 


APPENDIX  A. 

As  far  hack  as  1894,  my  friend  and  colleague,  W.  B.  Scott, 
in  a  paper  in  the  American  Journal  of  Science,  Vol.  XLVI1I, 
reviewing  Bateson's  theory  of  individual  variations  as  the 
method  of  evolution,  broaches  a  theory  the  suggestion  of 
which  was  derived  from  Waagen.  Adopting  Waagen 's 
term  mutation,  he  gives  to  it  the  meaning  of  a  continuous 
process  determined  along  definite  lines  by  underlying  and 
mere  fundamental  causes,  to  distinguish  it  from  the  more 
haphazard  and  discontinuous  operation  of  individual  varia- 
tions. The  evidence  of  paleontology,  Scott  maintains,  is 
strongly  in  favor  of  the  method  of  phylogenesis  rather  than 
that  of  variation.  The  former  he  compares  to  the  storm- 
center  of  a  cyclone,  which  proceeds  uniformly  in  a  path  of 
its  own,  'dependent  not  on  the  accumulation  of  the  cir- 
culating winds  but  upon  factors  of  a  much  wider  signifi- 
cance. '  The  circulating  winds  themselves  '  would  represent 
the  variations  which  occur  at  every  stage  in  the  history  of 
a  phylum,  while  the  course  of  the  storm-center  would  rep- 
resent the  phylogenetic  change,  or  mutations.' 

What  Scott  suggests  here  has  been  taken  up  and  worked 
out  in  the  now  famous  mutation-theory  of  Hugo  de  Vries 
whose  experiments  have  taken  the  form  of  a  more  careful 
and  exhaustive  investigation  of  the  development  of  plants 
than  had  ever  before  been  undertaken,  and  who  reaches 
the   conclusion  that  mutation  is  not  only  the  method  of 

715 


716  APPENDIX    A. 

evolution  in  plants,  but  that  it  is  very  probably  the  prin- 
cipal method  throughout  the  whole  domain  of  life. 

I  am  not  concerned  here  with  the  issue  between  the 
mutation-theory  and  its  critics  and  opponents.  It  may  be 
that  in  the  end  it  will  be  found  that  mutation,  variation 
and  organic  selection,  have  each  their  special  spheres  of  in- 
fluence and  are  severally  dominant  in  different  quarters  of 
the  biological  map.  The  points  I  wish  to  emphasize  are,  (1) 
that  among  the  mutationists  themselves  we  find  the  same 
fundamental  line  of  cleavage  showing  itself  which  we  have 
noted  elsewhere.  For  instance,  while  Scott  and  de  Vries 
agree  substantially  on  mutation  as  the  prevailing  method 
of  phylogenesis,  de  Vries  tends  to  align  himself  with  the 
orthodox  Darwinians  and  to  assign  a  practical  monopoly 
to  natural  selection;  whereas  Scott,  in  the  paper  I  have 
already  quoted,  repudiates  the  omnipotence  of  the  natural- 
selection-process,  such  as  is  maintained  by  Weismann  and 
his  followers,  on  the  grounds  that  it  asks  us  in  Bateson's 
words  "to  abrogate  reason. "  Scott  admits  that  an  objection 
lies  against  his  suggested  theory  'in  its  apparent  appeal  to 
a  mystical  directing  force,'  and  says  that  'such  mysterious 
forces  are  to  be  admitted  only  when  there  is  absolutely  no 
escape  from  them.'  'This  notion,  however,  of  a  directing 
factor  in  evolution  may  be  altogether  illusory,  and  yet  it  is 
difficult  to  shake  off.'  'It  may,  after  all,  be  only  the  ex- 
pression of  some  general  law  which  has  not  yet  been  formu- 
lated, but  if  it  be  real  we  shall  not  advance  our  science  by 
shutting  our  eyes  to  it. ' 

(2)  The  mutation-theory,  however  wide  its  scope  may 
be  found  to  be,  does  not  bring  forward  anything  incon- 
sistent with  the  general  metaphysical  doctrine  we  have 
developed  in  the  preceding  chapters.  Whether  mutation 
or  variation  pre-empt  the  field,— or,  as  Osborn  suggests, 
a  variety  of  processes  be  at  work,— biology  will  never 
find  itself  absolved  from  the  requirement  of  ultimate 
rationality.  And  whether  'the  mystical  directing  force' 
of    which    Scott    speaks    be    reducible    to    some    general 


APPENDIX    A.  717 

law  or  not,  is  not  a  matter  of  such  great  metaphysical 
moment.  For  general  law  itself  is  the  expression  of 
reason,  and  so  long  as  we  are  sure  that  the  world  must, 
in  the 'last  analysis,  be  rational,  the  grounds  of  our  meta- 
physics are  secure. 


APPENDIX  B. 

The  doctrine  of  the  preceding  discussions  is  that  conscious- 
ness is  the  great  reality  as  well  as  the  material  which  sup- 
plies the  concepts  and  categories  of  the  real  in  general. 
In  taking  this  ground  I  do  not  limit  consciousness  to 
the  cognitive  function,  or  to  mere  awareness.  It  is  aware- 
ness, of  course,  but  it  is  much  more.  By  consciousness  I 
mean  an  activity,  an  energy  that  becomes  aware  of  itself 
and  its  object.  The  fundamental  and  central  form  of 
consciousness,  so  conceived,  is  selfhood.  In  selfhood  its 
inner  nature  expresses  itself,  and  in  selfhood  it  becomes 
the  metaphysical  subject  of  those  categories  which  enable 
us  to  interpret  the  world  in  terms  of  its  inner,  and,  from 
any  other  point  of  view,  hidden  nature.  There  seem  to  be, 
in  the  last  analysis,  just  two  alternative  views  of  con- 
sciousness that  can  be  regarded  as  at  all  rational.  The  one 
is  that  which  conceives  it  as  mere  awareness  and  con- 
sequently, when  logical,  reduces  it  to  the  position  of 
a  mere  spectator  in  the  world.  The  other  is  the  view 
advocated  here;  namely,  that  consciousness  is  an  agent, — in 
fact  the  agent  of  agents,— revealing  in  its  activity  the  truth 
and  significance  of  the  inner  nature  of  things. 


718 


INDEX. 


Abraham,  487. 

Abrahamic  period,  494. 

Allen,  Grant,  435. 

Aesthetic  and  Analytic,  71. 

Alexandria,  495. 

America,    biologists    of,    196. 

Apocalypse,  638. 

Aryans,   456;    Aryo-Semitic,   496. 

Aristotle,. 31,  560,  574,  575. 

Atlas,  218. 

Augustine  St.,  672. 

Augustinian  invocation,  674. 


B 


Bacon,  Francis,  9,  31,  560. 
Baconian  principle,  16. 
Baldwin,    J.    M.,    193,    200,    206, 

208,  269,  272,  284,  295,    (f.n.) 

296,  410,  (f.n.)  564. 
Bagehot,  Walter,  272. 
Berkeley,   6,   215,   216,   233,   579, 

580,    583,    584. 
Bismarck,    316. 
Boscovitch,    163. 
Brinton,  D.  G.,  430,  435. 
Brahm,    497,    500,    501. 
Brahmism,   497,   499,  501. 
Brahmistic    creeds,    474. 
Buddha,  the,  497,  498,  501,  698. 

719 


Buddhism,  474,  498;  Buddhist, 
498,  501,  502;  B.  and  Brahm- 
anism,  513 ;  Buddhistic  and 
Christian,  505. 

Bunyan's  Christian,  581. 


Cartezian  philosophy,  569. 

Christ,  the,  509,  616. 

Christian  conception,  of  the  deity, 
503;  of  mediation,  508,  509; 
child  and  philosopher,  484,  485. 

Christology,  496. 

Christianity,  427,  495,  496,  497, 
500,  501,  502,  503,  548,  552, 
553. 

Clifford,  W.  K.,  101. 

Communal  mind,  293;  intelli- 
gence,   293;    memory,    293. 

Conscious  Activity,  215. 

Copernicus,  68. 

Copernican  revolution,  17,  66, 
70,  74,  75,  79,  82,  83,  332,  392. 

Consciousness  as  Knower,  21. 

Critique  of  Pure  Keason,   71. 


Darwin,  Charles,  196,  197. 
Darwinian- Weismannian      theory 
of  heredity,  195. 


720 


INDEX. 


Darwinism,   198. 

Descartes    to   Hegel,   481,   560. 

David,  544. 

Durkheim,  285. 

Dyaus  to  Indra,  493,  496. 


Edwards,  Jonathan,  662. 
Eleatic  being,  148. 
Egypt,  441. 

Emotion  and  Rationality,   369. 
English  Empiricism,  5. 
Ethical    Activities,    339;    plural- 
ism,  (f.n.)  369. 
Evolution   and  heredity,    194. 
Europe,  500. 
Ezra,    469. 


Father   in  Heaven,  503. 

Fiske,  John,  650,  651,  675. 

Formalists  and  Dynamists,  168. 

Fouillee,  (f.n.)  14. 

Foundations  of  Knowledge,  114, 
158,  357,  359,  398,  401,  404, 
(f.n.)   408,  421,  562,  569,  644. 

Freedom    and   Destiny,    653. 

G 

Giddings,  285,  288. 

Greek,  Olympus,  473;  pop.  relig., 
473;  monotheist,  473;  thought, 
474;  philosophy,  495;  methods 
and  ideas,  495;  G. — Oriental 
thought,  474;  G.  and  Hebrew 
culture,  495;  G. — Aryan,  496; 
G.  and  Hebrew  beliefs,  512. 


Hades,  646. 

Hamiltonian   infinite,  482. 

Headley,  205. 

Heavenly  Father,  501. 

Haeckel  Ernest,    (f.n.)    593. 

Hebrews,  441,   450,  551,  554. 


Hebrew     Scriptures,     469,     552; 

race,   497;    religion,    495. 
Hebra-Hellenism,  494;  Hebraism, 

495 ;    Hebrew-Semitic,    496. 
Hegel,  290,  425,  426,  481. 
Heightened    Suggestion,    300. 
Herder,  630. 
Hellenism,     495,     496;     Hellenic 

pantheism,  475. 
Hindu,  pantheism,  475 ;   thought, 

495;  ideas,  496;  Hindus,  499; 

religion,    548. 
Hinduism,    494,  496. 
Hobbes,   303. 
Hoffding,  H.,  524. 
Hume,  21,   26,   67,   68,    123,   149, 

216,   303,    372,    440. 
Humian   Sceptic,    3,   636. 
Huxley,    T.,    188,    382,    392,   429, 

435,  440,   441,   480. 


Idea  of  God,  604. 

India,    456,   473,   500,    502. 

Indian  pantheist,  473;  thought, 
474;  sage,  474;  depersonaliza- 
tion of  self,  475,  476,  479;  re- 
ligion, 496. 

Indra  to  Pragapati,   493,  496. 

Individual   and   Eternal,   516. 

Israel,  494;   Israelites,  496. 


James,    William,    196,    268,    429, 

634. 
Johnson,  R.  B.,  III. 
Jews    and    Samaritans,    2. 
Jehovah,  441,  450,  487,  488,  495, 

501,  503. 
Jehovistic    faith,    495;     religion, 

500,  502,  503. 
John,    St.,   427. 
Jesus,  381,  382. 
Judaism,  427,  441,  487,  514,  548. 


INDEX. 


721 


Kant,  21,  66,  67,  68,  69,  71,  72, 
73,  74,  76,  77,  78,  79,  80,  81, 
82,  86,  125,  133,  135,  146,  158, 
332,  342,  359,  372,  488,  531, 
560,  567,  574,  642,  654,  673, 
675,  706,  709,  713;  Copernican 
revolution,  5,  6,  7. 

L 

Ladd,  G.  T.,  420. 

Lang,  A.,  429. 

Lamarck,     (f.n.)    196,    197,    199, 

202. 
Lamarckism,   198,  202,   309,   443, 

647. 
Lainarckian-Spencerian  theory  of 

hered.,   195. 
Lecky,  380. 

Leibnitz,  163,  185,  369,  560. 
Locke,  67,  69,  219,  573,  580. 
Logos,    (f.n.)    457. 
Lotze,   55,   56,  91,   96,  479. 

M 

Man  's  Environment,  681. 

Man  and  his  Beliefs,  704. 

Maya,  476. 

Maine,  the,  316. 

Max  Miiller,  420,   429,   440,  455, 

456,  491,   496,  548. 
Milton,   435. 
Mill,    J.    S.,    104,    105,    129,    166, 

167,    587. 
Methods  in  Philosophy,  64. 
Morgan,     Lloyd,     200,     206;     M. 

Baldwin-Poulton    view,     207 
Morgan,  T.   H.,  206. 
Moses,    441,    487,    494;     Mo  aie 

legislation,      487;       Economy, 

494. 

N 
Nature,    579. 
Nature  of  man,  627. 


Naturalism  and  met.,  8. 
Nehemiah,  469. 
Nazareth,  man  of,  698. 
Neo-Platonism,  495,   497. 
Newton,    166,    167. 
Newtonian   Physics,   5,   67,   559. 


Omar,    671. 
One,    the,    503. 
Organic  movements,   187. 
Orient,  473. 

Osborn,  H.  F.,  199,  200,  202,  206, 
207,   716. 


Paul,    St.,   486. 

Peru,  429. 

Phylogenic  and  Ontogenic,  192. 

Physical   Activities,   158. 

Philosophy   as   Synthetic,   4. 

Phariseean   and   Sadducean,   494. 

Philo-Judaeus,  495. 

Philosophy  and  Experience,  557. 

Philistine,   the,   656. 

Plato,  161,  567,  574,  675. 

Platonism,    14. 

Poulton,  E.  B.,  205,  206. 

Psychological  Beview,  (f.n.)   266. 

Pragapati,  496,  497. 

Primary  certitude,  119. 

Procrustean  bed,  698. 


Quetelet,  285. 


B 


Biis,   Jacob,  659. 

Rome,  pantheon,   473. 

Religion,  413;  Origin  and  De- 
velopment, 429;  Philosophical 
Aspects,    489. 

Romanes,  G.,    (f.n.)    196. 

Royce,  J.,  3,  16,  86,  272,  284, 
369,  525,  564,   (f.n.)   567,  640. 


722 


INDEX. 


Schopenhauer,  14,  55,  56,  233. 

Scott,  W.   B.,  200,  715,  716. 

Socratic  dialectic,  474,  563,  579. 

Social  Activities,  262. 

Spencer,  H.,  156,  188,  195,  (f.n.) 
196,  198,  201,  276,  282,  284, 
293,  305,  311,  346,  429,  435, 
449,  450,  461,  478,  479,  483, 
487,   488. 

Strong,  C.  A.,  102,  104,  114,  116, 
242. 

Spinoza,  54,  303,   474,  662. 

Sin  and  Retribution,  533. 

Stout,    I.    F.,    564. 


Tarde,    272,    284. 

Taylor,  A.  E.,  344. 

The  Dialectic,   139. 

The  Ethical  Synthesis,  367. 

The  Mental   and   Physical,   236. 

The      Social      Individual,      262; 

Community,      284,      Synthesis, 

312. 


Tinker,  dream  of,  II. 
The    Religious    Synthesis,    459. 
Tylor,    429,    435,    436,    529,    549, 
550,  551. 

U 

Upanishads,  493,  495,  496,  500. 

V 

Vedas,   456,  496. 

Vedic,    religion,    473,   496;    post- 

Vedic  developments,   492,  495; 

Hymns,  500. 
Vries,  Hugo  de,  715. 

W 

Ward,   J.,   Ill,    (f.n.)    564. 
Weismann,      196 ;      Weismanism, 

270. 
Westminster    standards,    510. 
Wilson,   E.   B.,   206. 
Wordsworth,    685. 
World  of  Existents,  99. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 


Foundations  of  Knowledge 

IN  THREE   PARTS 
Cloth  8vo.  $3.00  net 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

PART  I. 
GROUND  CONCEPTS  OF  KNOWLEDGE 

CHAPTER  I.  The  Notion  of  Experience. 

CHAPTER  II.  Experience  and  Reality. 

CHAPTER  III.  Knowledge.  Experience  and  Reality. 

CHAPTER  IV.  The  Idea  of  Method  in  Knowledge. 

PART  II. 
EVOLUTION  OF  THE  CATEGORIES   OF   KNOWLEDGE 

CHAPTER  I.  Nature  of  the  Categories. 

CHAPTER  II.  Space  and  Time— Presentative. 

CHAPTER  III.  Space  and  Time-Conceptual. 

CHAPTER  IV.  The  Consciousness  of  Quantity  and  Quality. 

CHAPTER  V.  The  Volitional  Categories— Cause. 

CHAPTER  VI.  Substance. 

CHAPTER  VII.  Community  or  Interaction. 

CHAPTER  VIII.  The  Dynamic  Consciousness. 

CHAPTER  IX.  The  Aesthetic  Categories. 

CHAPTER  X.  The  Subject  Consciousness. 

CHAPTER  XI.  Categories  of  the  Subject  Consciousness. 

CHAPTER    XII.  The  World  of  Individuals. 

CHAPTER  XIII.  The  Consciousness  of  Community. 

PART  III. 
THE  TRANSCENDENT  FACTOR  IN   KNOWLEDGE 

CHAPTER         I.    Knowledge  and  Belief. 
CHAPTER       II.    Science  and  Metaphysics 

CHAPTER      III.    Judgments  of  Truth  and  Judgments  of  Value. 
CHAPTER      IV.    The  Transcendent  as  Experience. 
CHAPTER       V.    The  Transcendent  Object    (Cosmology). 
CHAPTER      VI.    The  Transcendent  Subject    (Psycho-Theology). 
CHAPTER    VII.    The  Transcendent  Ground  of  Religion. 
CHAPTER  VIII.    Grounding  of  Relative  Conceptions. 
CHAPTER      IX.     The  Mvstie  Element  in  Knowledge. 
CHAPTER       X.    Transcendent  Ground  of  Ethics— Conclusion. 

Conclusion. 

Supplementary  Note. 

Index. 

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